


Those Who Favor Fire

by CSHfic, VSfic



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Assassination Attempt(s), Assassination Plot(s), Established Relationship, Fake Character Death, Fire Lord Zuko, Fire Nation (Avatar), Grief/Mourning, Hurt Sokka (Avatar), Hurt/Comfort, Kid Fic, M/M, Married Couple, Not Really Character Death, Post-Canon, Post-War, Presumed Dead, spymaster sokka au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-07-29
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:20:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 30,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25415320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CSHfic/pseuds/CSHfic, https://archiveofourown.org/users/VSfic/pseuds/VSfic
Summary: After a failed attempt on his life, Sokka fakes his death, dons a disguise, and infiltrates the would-be assassin's ranks in an attempt to bring them down from the inside.Zuko learns of his husband's tragic death, mourns, and vows revenge.
Relationships: Sokka/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 712
Kudos: 2752
Collections: AtLA <50k fics to read, Zukka





	1. Lucky, Indeed

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was loosely inspired by [this Spymaster Sokka AU post](https://zukkababey.tumblr.com/post/622998361388236800/regarding-the-rumors-i-will-deny-into-my-dying) by @zukkababey and [this absolutely stunning art](https://sword-over-water.tumblr.com/post/623158037441642497/a-secretive-kyoshi-warrior-by-the-name-of-shikyo) by @sword-over-water on Tumblr.
> 
> [Fanart from @justbuni!](https://justbuni.tumblr.com/post/633808163860250624/redraw-of-this-post-by-theandromedarecord-based)
> 
> [Plus more fanart from @sword-over-water!](https://sword-over-water.tumblr.com/post/626077016025956352/the-door-opened-it-was-not-an-assassin-probably)

Sokka was being followed. 

He was pretty sure, anyway. Even late at night, downtown Cranefish Town wasn’t exactly a quiet place, but there weren’t many restaurants or wine houses this close to the harbor, and while the crowds in the street had thinned considerably, he couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched. The council meeting had gone long, and then there had been a reception afterwards, which Sokka would normally have been enthusiastic about. Food, wine, a break from the monotony of policymaking to have a real conversation, what more could a guy want? But the atmosphere of the evening had felt oddly… tense.

Sokka felt like he was glancing along the edge of some deeper conversation the whole night. The representatives from the council had been there, but there were a lot of faces that Sokka didn’t know, too—community members, business owners, the sort of people that kept a growing city like this going. And, spirits, it was refreshing to go to an event that _wasn’t_ all nobility, once in a while, but Sokka had gotten the distinct impression that he wasn’t welcome in those conversations, which... That was fine. He was a prince now, after all, strange as that thought was. 

He couldn’t really blame them for not wanting him there. Their smiles had been friendly and the wine had kept coming, and he’d accepted probably more glasses than he should have out of politeness, and drunk some and abandoned most when his hosts weren’t looking. But he’d felt the whole time like he was being scrutinized, and not just in the way he was used to as the Fire Lord’s husband, but like the shadow of something watching him, waiting for an opening, a catigator lurking in the reeds. 

He’d brushed it off at first. Back when he’d been acting as an ambassador, before he’d married the Fire Lord and they’d decided that there was a bit of a conflict of interest there, these sorts of summits lasted for weeks, dwelling on whatever nitpicky minutiae the stuffy old bureaucrats settled on. Today he was here as the Fire Nation’s Liaison to Cranefish Town’s budding council, maybe a bit as an ideas guy, but mostly to show that the Fire Nation supported the colonies’ growing interest in independence. Technically, he was only supposed to be here for another day, due to catch an early ship back to his husband and daughter by this time tomorrow. 

But that was if he made it that far.

Sokka turned down another alley, glancing quickly over his shoulder. He could just see the edge of someone’s shadow peeking out from behind the corner, but they didn’t round the bend like they would have if they were just passing by. They paused, like they were waiting for him to turn away. His heart was thumping in his chest as he rounded the next corner. 

Sokka’s fingers were frustratingly clumsy on the straps of his bag. Fuck him, if he’d known how the night was going to go, he might have been a little less polite about the wine.

(Or maybe that had been the point. He tried to picture the other party-goers faces, the ones who’d kept pushing glasses of wine on him, but nothing sinister came to mind, and certainly no one had _seemed_ like they were trying to get him drunk to make an easy target of him—)

He wasn’t wearing any armor, and the company had been a bit too polite for him to openly wear a sword to the party. He was never one to go unprepared, though, so he’d stowed his sword in his bag for the day just in case. Sokka breathed through his nose and kept walking, shaking the sword loose from its wraps. The next alley opened up into the fish market, closed now, and beyond that was where the ferry picked up to take passengers across the canal. He darted out the other side of the alley and dared to run the next block, trying to lose his pursuer before they rounded the bend.

The dock creaked quietly underfoot, swaying gently with the buffered waves coming off the bay. He took the stairs two at a time and tried not to look like he was running as he angled down the walk. He thanked every spirit that he hadn’t missed the ferry, because this late at night, the next one wouldn’t be along for at least an hour. It was chilly on the water, but there was a lantern flickering inside the cabin. Sokka crossed the last few salt-sprayed feet of the dock.

Something stopped him short of the gangplank. He hesitated, but the back of his mind was screaming that something was wrong here. What?

The captain. Sokka took a step back from the ship. The captain should have been here, taking tickets, as he had been every other night, grumbling about the hour and smoking like a chimney. The dock was empty. The flickering lantern glow in the cabin took an almost ominous light, less like a welcoming beacon, and so much more like a polar anglerfish lure, innocently coaxing him along past rows of sharp teeth. 

Fuck, he was stupid. He’d walked himself right into a dead end. There was nowhere else to go now that he was on the dock, other than further onto the captainless ferry, where they’d have him cornered and isolated. That was probably their plan all along, to follow him here and get him alone on the empty docks. The water churned beneath his feet, cold and inky black, with nothing but the faint light of the near full moon warring with the overcast sky. The quiet thump of someone dropping onto the dock behind him was the only warning he had.

He drew his sword and spun in one smooth motion. He had an instant to take in the backlit shadow of his attacker, the shape of her and the twist of her arm, and he quickly shifted his sword to sweep her first strike aside. The blade glanced along the hard edge of the woman’s metal fan, and it was all he could do to twist his grip and clumsily bash the second fan aside before she could recover, because—

—because he knew this armor, and those fans, the undeniable stance, but what was a Kyoshi Warrior doing here, why was she attacking him? The moonlight glinted from her metal headpiece and cast a flicker of shadow across her painted face. She grimaced when he blocked her strike, and the absolutely ruthless look in her eye cut a chill through him. 

“What do you think you’re doing?” he shouted, and if it came out a bit strangled who could blame him, because _what the fuck_? Sokka hadn’t done anything to her, and he was friends with them, he’d trained with them, even. Her face may have been unfamiliar, but even if this woman was a stranger to him, that should have counted for something.

She didn’t answer him, just pressed on, forcing him further up the dock, further away from the shore. 

Something wasn’t quite right in the way she wielded her fans. The Kyoshi Warriors treated the fan as an extension of their arm, but she was wielding it more like a dagger, almost clumsy and graceless in the furthest possible way from Suki’s deft mastery of the weapons. Sokka was no expert, he wouldn’t say he was even particularly good at the Kyoshi Warriors’ ways, nothing like the women he’d trained with, but even he could see the sloppiness in her forms, like… 

Well, like she wasn’t really a Kyoshi Warrior. 

It didn’t mean she wasn’t deadly. She was _trained_ , Sokka could hardly catch a moment to press back on an attack with the fury of her movements. She battered him like a blunt object where any Kyoshi Warrior would use their opponent’s moves against them. Sokka tried the same now, let her thrust forward with her fan and slipped his arm just beneath, twisted her wrist and used the force of her strike to settle his grip on her arm. He thrust out his elbow and the fan fumbled in her hand, clattered on the dock, and disappeared with a splash. 

She bared her teeth and kicked for his knee, and he barely pulled his foot back in time to keep her boot heel from connecting. It put him off balance, and she shouldered into him and shoved him away before he could disarm her of the other fan. 

He staggered back, and his trailing foot caught a sea-sprayed patch of dock and he fucking _slipped_. Of course, of course he did, he couldn’t catch a break—

Sokka wasn’t quite fast enough to recover. He staggered and landed hard on his knee, and she was on him like an eel hound in an instant. The katana on her belt flashed, and Sokka angled his sword and gripped the flat of it to partly deflect the blow. She aimed for his neck, but Space Sword was made of harder stuff. He barely kept his fingers as sparks flew from the force of it. Sokka gasped as the partly deflected strike slipped on her downswing and slashed across his unarmored side. 

Shit, shit, _shit_ , if he didn’t do something, he was going to—

She raised her katana above her head again, an executioner’s stance. Sokka didn’t hesitate, didn’t think, just planted his palm on the hilt of his sword and drove it forward with all his weight.

The breath went out of her with a soft _whuff_ , and the force behind her slash stuttered clumsily. Her blade slipped from her grip before it could slide clean along his neck. He looked at her and expected surprise, or fear, but she only looked furious. She flicked her wrist, and he batted her arm away before she could sink the knife in her sleeve in his back. 

“I’m sorry,” he said. She slumped and went still. He tried not to think about it too much as he pulled his sword free. He set it on the ground next to his knee, then leaned back heavily, hand bracing his wounded side. He huffed a breath and clenched his teeth before pulling his hand back. 

A dark stain was seeping into the fabric. Sokka hissed through his teeth as he peeled the layers back to inspect the damage. He prodded the outside of the wound. It was—hm. Not great, but could be… could be worse. With another shaky breath, Sokka folded up his jacket and pressed it against his side to staunch the bleeding. 

Sokka took a good look at the fake Kyoshi Warrior’s face. Now that she was still, beneath the makeup he thought—no, he knew he recognized her. She’d been at the party, earlier, not one of the council women in attendance, but maybe as a guest… 

She’d come to kill him tonight, dressed like a Kyoshi Warrior to… what? To catch him off guard? And the more immediately pressing question: why?

There were shadows moving up the boardwalk. Sokka watched them for a moment, as they moved down the dark pier and onto the first dock. His heart was pounding from the fight, but he still felt the panic dig beneath his ribs. He wasn’t feeling very good about his chances that these people weren’t looking for him, too, and when they found him here, wounded and alone on the docks... Well. He probably wouldn’t get lucky twice. 

But they’d started on the opposite end of the pier, so he still had time, if not many options. 

The ferry was moored and captainless. It wasn’t a Water Tribe ship. Sokka wasn’t sure if he could get it moving across the water without them noticing and coming after him, and the last thing he needed was to swap being cornered on the dock for being cornered on the open water. 

He could swim. Sokka glanced down at the murky water, eyed the distance to the opposite shore. He was a strong swimmer, but that was probably not a smart choice with an open wound. 

The only other option was back the way he’d come. He’d have to walk right by them to reach the street, and there was no way he’d make it past without being spotted, not when they were out here looking for him…

Ah. He glanced down at the Kyoshi Warrior. They were looking for _him_ , though, weren’t they? 

He made quick work stripping her of the upper half of her armor and her green outer robe, until she was down to the sleek black dress he’d seen her in at the party. He grit his teeth and cinched the wound on his side with her belt, very aware that Katara would be grumbling at him about how half-assed that was, but he didn’t have time for a real dressing right now. Sokka had worn the Kyoshi Warriors’ garb enough times that he could manage even in the dark. He didn’t bother pulling all the armor off her, just took the chest plate, the shoulders and the bracers. Sokka stripped off her sword and her fan and took those too, since no Kyoshi Warrior would be caught without them. 

Sokka’s own sword and jacket were bloody. He yanked out his hair tie, shoved everything back into his bag, and wrapped it up. Sokka hesitated, picturing where he’d seen Suki pull her makeup from the last time he’d seen her reapplying. Left pocket? He checked and was rewarded with a little metal tin of facepaint. It’d be harder to recognize him, beneath the makeup. Sokka knew he was still gambling here, because if they knew her well enough he’d be in trouble anyway, but he couldn’t dwell on the what-if’s now when this was the best option he had. If nothing else, it could buy him some time.

(This would have been easier with a mirror, and also maybe if his fingers weren’t shaking and bloody and if the wound on his side wasn’t pulsing like the tide, but he’d applied the warrior’s facepaint often enough to get the job done).

With her heavy boots and the armor still strapped around her legs and waist, the body sank like a stone. Sokka said a quick prayer for her as she went under—even though she’d tried to kill him, he’d stolen her armor, and that felt like a shameful enough trade-off for him to toss out a quick apology for her spirit. He glanced at the overcast shadow of the moon, too, and thought _please_ , let the tide carry her away from here, to where they won’t find her and learn who I am.

Then, with his identifiable belongings wrapped in a bundle on his back, he carefully, casually picked his way over the slippery dock toward the boardwalk. They’d finished their search of one of the docks and were coming back around. There was a woman at the front of the group, dressed in the casual style of the colonies. 

_Shit_ , his betrothal necklace. Sokka froze on the end of the dock, hand on his throat. He was so used to wearing it, he’d almost forgotten it was there. He yanked the knot undone, wincing at the bloody thumbprint he’d smeared on the band in his haste. 

Sokka shoved the necklace into the bag with his sword just as the group turned. His stomach swooped as the woman’s gaze swept his way, and he forced himself to continue walking steadily toward the road.

But then she turned, and Sokka realized with dread that she wasn’t just looking past him, she had spotted him, and was coming this way. That was—fine. Okay... He could get through this, he just needed to bluff long enough to get away from them, and then he could find somewhere safe to contact the Fire Nation retinue he’d come with. Sokka flexed his fingers around the hilt of his stolen katana, and it took everything in him to keep calm as the rest of the group moved to join her. 

The woman didn’t _look_ hostile. Her gaze flicked down to the spattering of blood on Sokka’s robe, and she frowned. If anything, she looked… almost impatient.

“You were told to tail him and wait for us,” the woman said. 

Well, shit. She knew the Kyoshi Warrior, or at least, she’d been expecting her. She didn’t seem at all thrown by Sokka’s appearance as she drew closer, though, so maybe this was supposed to be their first meeting. Sokka hesitated for just a moment. 

“...He noticed me following him. Something at the party must have put him on edge,” Sokka said. That part was true. “He was going to escape if I didn’t do something.”

She shook her head at Sokka, and at the mess of his robes beneath the armor. “Well, that was incredibly stupid,” she said. “You’re lucky he didn’t kill you.”

Lucky, indeed.

The woman sighed and scrubbed a hand over her face. “I have to admit, though… I’m a little impressed. Just _don’t_ pull that shit again.”

“I won’t,” Sokka promised. 

“What did you do with the body?” she asked.

“Ah,” he said. He glanced back toward the ferry. “He went over the side.”

“That wasn’t the plan,” she said.

“You can go after it, if you’d like,” Sokka bluffed. The woman scowled, glancing at the murky waters beneath the dock like she was actually considering it.

Well, shit. What the fuck did they need his body for? Sokka’s heartbeat quickened. If they fished the assassin’s body out of the bay, they were going to realize he’d been lying to them the moment they saw that he was wearing the other half of her armor. She looked ready to call his bluff, eyeing the best route down to the water from the pier. His fingers flexed around his bag, with his jacket and his sword and his _betrothal necklace_ , but… what choice did he have?

“I have this,” he said, slinging his bag down off his shoulder. “I was just… cleaning up.” 

He opened the bag and offered it up. His bloody jacket looked much more gruesome now in the lamplight, streaked with dark stains after he’d used it to staunch the bleeding on his side. The severe slash along the side told a plain enough story. 

_Forgive me, Space Sword. I’ll come back for you,_ he thought.

“There’s your proof. The sword’s recognizable. One of a kind,” he added reluctantly, maybe a bit too wistful, though the woman didn’t seem to notice. His stomach sunk as he added, “And the, uh, necklace... is his.”

He hated the way her expression lit up at that, tilting the pendant toward the light. She tucked the necklace in her pocket.

“Fine. I’ll let him know it’s done,” she said. Sokka nodded, even though he had no idea who she was talking about. “Don’t let this go to your head. Next time won’t be so simple.”

 _Next time_. Dread crept up on him. And earlier she’d said _Don’t pull that shit again_ , hadn’t she? Like this wasn’t the end of it. Who were these people?

“Where are you staying?” she asked, and it was such an innocuous question that it caught Sokka completely off guard. 

“Oh.” Well, definitely not at his fancy hotel on the other side of the canal, where all his luggage was waiting half-packed for his planned trip home tomorrow. He hedged, “I haven’t found a place yet.”

“We’ll put you up for the night,” she offered.

“You don’t have to do that,” Sokka said, because he couldn’t say, _I won’t be able to slip away and contact my husband if you do that_.

She raised an eyebrow at him. “Well, you can’t stay at an inn. You’re covered in blood,” she said. “Unless you have somewhere more important to be?”

There was a bit of a challenge in her voice, beneath that casual offer. She was testing him. Whether it was because she sensed something was off about him, or because the night hadn’t gone exactly as planned, she clearly didn’t trust him yet. 

He couldn’t contact Zuko now. Something told him they’d be watching him whether he went with her or not, and if they learned he wasn’t who he claimed to be before Sokka figured out whatever she meant by _next time_ , he was sure they’d scatter. They’d change their plans, and they’d be extra careful to make sure the job, whatever it was, got done right when they tried again. And that was assuming they didn’t just stab him in the back, and finish him off now.

“If you have the room,” he said, with a slight shrug. 

She nodded, satisfied, and gestured for him to follow. He hesitated for only a moment before complying. Spirits, what was he thinking? He might as well step right into a platypus bear trap and save them all the trouble.

They’d taken his sword. Handing it over had been like handing over a piece of himself. At least they hadn’t taken his stolen katana, because he was a little worried he would need it. He’d as much expected her to lead him back to her own home as he expected to be stabbed in the back by one of her men, when she gestured for him to follow her.

She did neither, winding back down the pier toward the fisheries. They stopped in front of an old stone building, crumbling and marked with only the faded outline of where a sign might have hung once. Sokka had nearly walked right past here, trying to escape the fake Kyoshi Warrior. He shuddered to think how close he must have come to stumbling into the whole group at once. 

He’d half expected the inside to be some kind of secret hideout, with hidden doors and secret codes like White Lotuses used. Instead the inside was… just a fishery. The smell was awful, and the cleanliness of the gutting troughs left a lot to be desired. The floor looked like its own murder scene, with standing pools of foul smelling backwash plugging half the drains dotted along the floor. Sokka gagged and made a mental note to avoid any fish from Cranefish Town that wasn’t fresh from the boat.

The back room looked a little more like what he’d expected, with tables arranged like they might be meant for a break room. There were several more rooms toward the back, but the doors were all shut tight. She gestured toward one of the closed doors with a wave of her hand. 

The room she’d sent him to looked like a store room, but there was a thin cot pressed into one corner of the cramped space. It clearly wasn’t meant to be a bedroom, more like a quick place for one of the fish gutters to take a nap during their break. He eyed the cot and the thin blanket and hoped that it had been treated better than the floor in the other room. 

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the woman hook a thumb in his direction, sharing a brief and silent exchange with one of the other men from her search party. Sokka pretended not to notice. He’d been right to assume they’d be watching him.

“I’m just gonna…” he waved vaguely at the mess of his robes and moved to close the door. He needed a bit of space, to clean up, to deal with the cut on his side, and to think, without this woman watching his every move. 

“Tomorrow night,” the woman said with no preamble. Sokka hesitated with his hand on the doorknob. “Don’t make any plans.” She gave him a once over, with mild distaste. “Don’t go anywhere, either. We can’t have anyone asking questions.”

She didn’t explain any further, and Sokka didn’t wait for her to. He nodded and shut himself inside, and tried very hard to convince himself that he’d made the right decision in getting himself into this mess. 

This was… feeling a bit too close to a prison cell for comfort, with only a small half-window and very little light. There was a candle on the lone table in the room, and Sokka lit it with the spark rocks hanging off the holder. He eased down to sit on the cot, one hand pressed to his side. In the grand scheme of well thought out plans, this one was falling firmly, unfortunately, on Zuko’s preferred end of the scale. He needed to figure out what was going on here. Somehow he had to learn who else was involved, too, and when whatever they were planning was supposed to go down (and he _knew_ they were planning something), all without tipping them off that he didn’t belong. 

What he really _wanted_ was to find a way to slip away and warn Zuko. Sokka didn’t think that was possible, at least not now. They clearly had no history with the Kyoshi Warrior, and after he’d apparently ignored their plans, he had the distinct impression that they were waiting for him to step out of line. With the way his night was going, it’d be just his luck for them to look into his story any minute now and notice the holes, and then someone was going to bust through that door and finish the job the fake Kyoshi Warrior had started.

As though the spirits were taunting him for that grim thought, someone chose that moment to knock, hesitantly, on the door. Sokka set his fan down on the cot next to him, carefully in reach, and readjusted his stolen katana. 

“What?” he said, because he was tired and if they were going to come in here and stab him, the least they could do was get the door themselves. 

The door opened. It was not an assassin. Probably. It was… a child, dressed in earth kingdom greens, with short cropped brown hair. The clothes were worn, showing inches of skin at the ankles and wrists, like he’d just gone through a growth spurt. He seemed eager to come in, but the wind went out of his sails when he saw Sokka’s expression and his bloody robes.

“Can I help you?” Sokka asked, after it became apparent the kid was just going to stand there and stare forever. 

“Amai said you were bleeding,” he said. Ah, Sokka thought, so she had noticed.

He was holding a small first aid kit. Sokka took it from him, but the kid made no move to leave, just stood and looked at him like he expected Sokka to do something exciting. 

“No offense kid, but unless you’re a waterbender, I think I’ll do it myself,” Sokka said.

“I’m not a bender,” the kid said, a little like a challenge. So, that was apparently a touchy subject. Sokka could relate to that, especially when he was younger. The way the kid said it, though, a little too defensively, told Sokka that at least some of the people here were. 

“Neither am I,” Sokka said simply. 

The Kyoshi Warrior hadn’t been, either. Sokka ran what he’d seen tonight through his mind, trying to recall the way the others had acted. Even if they didn’t bend in front of him, there would be little tells in their stances, and the way they carried themselves, that might tell Sokka more about what he was up against. He’d need to keep an eye out. 

“Did you really kill him?” the kid asked. Sokka stared at him for a moment, then nodded. The kid shrugged, nonchalant, like he didn’t find that particularly impressive or anything. “That’s cool.”

Oh, boy. The kid was trying to subtly look around the room, clearly snooping, but with a vaguely disinterested expression on his face just in case Sokka got the idea that he wasn’t cool and aloof. 

“What’s your name, kid?” Sokka asked. 

“Hato,” he said. 

“How old are you, Hato?” he asked. 

That made the kid puff up a bit. “Twelve,” he said. 

Sweet spirits, this was… a literal child. Sokka stared at him for another moment, trying to imagine ever having been that young. He’d been about Hato’s age when he asked his dad to take him to war with the other men. Aang and Toph were about Hato’s age, too, when he’d met them. 

(Tui and La, they were tiny. How the fuck did anyone let them fight a war?)

The kid was doing his best to seem casual about it, but Sokka could recognize his expression for what it was. It was the same way he’d looked at his dad and the other warriors when he was young, wanting so desperately to be one of them. Sokka didn’t know how he felt about being a role model for this child with apparently murderous aspirations. He frowned. “A little young to be wrapped up in something like this, aren’t you, Hato?”

“No,” Hato said stubbornly. “And I want to be here. He deserved it. He should have stayed out of our city.”

“Do you actually believe that, or are you just repeating what the rest of them are saying?” Sokka asked. 

The kid bristled. “Of course I believe it,” he said. “Why wouldn’t I believe it?”

“You’re twelve. You didn’t even know the guy,” Sokka said. 

“Did _you_ know him?” Hato asked. 

“No,” Sokka said. He’d never met the Kyoshi Warrior in his life, he was sure of it. Even out of her makeup at the party, he didn’t recognize her. The more he thought about it, the more he doubted her coming after him was personal. Zuko had dealt with his fair share of assassination attempts since his coronation, more than Sokka would have liked, and very few of those had been personal, either. Most of those people had been motivated by old grudges, old loyalties, or simply, money. 

But nothing about this kid was old. He couldn’t have been much older than Izumi was now when the war ended. Everything he thought he believed, he’d picked up from the people around him. And now he was here, talking to a stranger who he thought murdered a man in cold blood, like he was interesting and admirable, and not terrifying. 

“How’d you even find this place?” Sokka asked. 

“Tolon is my older brother,” he said, in exactly the tone that meant that Sokka was definitely supposed to know who Tolon was. That… certainly explained a lot. It was a lot easier to imagine how a twelve year old kid had gotten himself dragged into a family member’s poor choices than it was to reconcile how a kid who’d barely been alive during the end of the war could have fallen in with a group of assassins. He was, after all, married to the poster child of manipulative families, and he knew how difficult it could be to carve your own opinions out of already-set stone. It was worrying, though. The sort of person who was willing to get a kid this age wrapped up in an assassination plot was not the sort of person Sokka expected to be reasonable. 

“I haven’t met him,” Sokka said. He hoped that was true. Although if it wasn’t, he would have bigger problems than lying badly to a twelve year old, because if this Tolon guy had met the Kyoshi Warrior, he was definitely going to notice that Sokka wasn’t her. 

“Oh. You’ll meet him tomorrow,” Hato said. “He’s in charge. They’re gonna talk about the plan, I think. All the benders get to fight.” _Fight who_ , Sokka wanted to ask, but he wasn’t sure if that would give him away, and the kid was building himself up to something anyway, rambling. “There’s no way they won’t let _you_ fight, even if you’re a non-bender. Maybe I can—” He hesitated. “Will you show me how to—”

“Hey, kid!” Someone rapped on the door, and Hato jumped about a foot in the air. Sokka didn’t startle, but that was only partly training, and mostly the blood loss making him a little dizzy. One of the women that had been hunting for him on the docks was leaning against the doorway. She was scowling right at Sokka. 

“You don’t have to let him annoy you, just tell him to get the fuck out,” she said. She jerked her chin toward the doorway, and turned her eye on Hato, who’d gone from eager back to standoffish in a heartbeat. “Come on. You think they want to talk to you?” 

She shut the door behind him, and Sokka stared at it for a long moment. He almost wanted to call him back in here. A blabbermouth kid was more likely to spill information than any of the rest of them. But then, Sokka had to question how much they’d let a kid learn, or how reliable his information was, and of course he couldn’t trust him not to mention that Sokka was asking questions…

Sokka shook his head and hauled the first aid kit into his lap. He opened it, and… there was fishing line, a bottle of… was that moonshine? And, yep, that was definitely a fish hook with the barb clipped off. 

Hm. 

At least the bandages looked clean. He stared at the kit for a moment, and then he couldn’t help but laugh. Maybe he could just… glue the wound shut, and hope for the best.

Well, whatever. Katara was already going to kill him (again?) for getting stabbed in the first place. Sokka picked up the fucking moonshine, and, wincing, peeled back the warrior’s bloody robes to have another look at the damage. 

Zuko sighed and pushed the scroll he was reading across his desk. He pinched the bridge of his nose to relieve the tension there. It was barely noon, but he was pretty sure that if he had to spend another minute staring at the minister’s overly flowery script he was going to lose it.

There was a quiet rap on the study door. Zuko glanced up at it distractedly, then back down at the pile of unopened messages on his desk. 

“Enter,” Zuko said. He still had a whole stack of other scrolls to get through. Maybe he could set the minister’s aside and come back around to it later. He briefly entertained the idea of just… losing it in the pile, and making the man come to meet him in person, so that he could ask him to just come out and say what he needed to say without waxing poetic on and on...

The servant hadn’t come in. Instead she was standing frozen in the doorway, like she didn’t quite know what to do with herself. Zuko glanced up at her and her face fell, as though she’d been hoping he wouldn’t notice her. She looked pale, and quite young, wringing her hands together in a fidgety way that the more experienced servants had trained out of them. A little lance of anxiety pricked the back of Zuko’s mind, taking in her expression. Why was she staring at him like that?

“My Lord,” she said, quietly, and then hesitated again.

The woman didn’t just look nervous. She looked almost sick with worry, like she was… well, like she was afraid of him. Zuko frowned guiltily. He’d thought they were past this. He’d tried to make it clear that he wasn’t his father, he wasn’t cruel. They had no reason to be afraid. He’d tried to make everyone, his ministers, his advisors, but especially the staff understand that, but apparently he hadn’t done a very good job of it. Her eyes raked over his face and then skittered to the floor like she couldn’t bear to look at him. 

She bowed low, even for a servant, shoulders hunched forward defensively, her hands milk white where she clenched her skirt in two great fistfulls. Her voice was small and strangely breathless when she spoke again. 

“My Lord, we’ve just received an urgent message from Cranefish Town,” she said, and Zuko’s heart leapt in his throat. “There was an… incident during the night.”

A chill swept over him, ice pricking his fingertips, as he watched the words forming on her lips. He saw them, he _heard_ them, but he—no, he couldn’t have, the blood was rushing in his ears and he _couldn’t have_ heard her correctly, because—

“...inform you that Prince Sokka has been killed, my Lord. I’m sorry.”

“He—no,” Zuko said. He shoved himself to his feet, strangely clumsy, fingers numb where they gripped the edge of the desk. No, no—he couldn't have. Sokka wasn’t. His breath was coming too quick, too shallow, hot and tight in his chest. He barely registered the woman’s flinch at the harshness of his tone. “No, that’s not… He wouldn’t…” 

Wouldn’t what? Zuko didn’t know, wouldn’t die, wouldn’t leave him, he just _wouldn’t_. He tried to draw a breath and it was like being buried alive under the awful, heavy weight of it. His face was hot, and his vision blurred. He shook his head to try to clear it, and swiped a hand over his damp cheeks.

How could this have happened? He was only supposed to be gone for another day. He was supposed to have guards. He was—

“Where is he?” Zuko asked, and her gaze flickered between the familiar fear, and incomprehension. Pity. “The body,” he insisted. “Did they leave him there?”

“He—” She hesitated, bowed lower. “There will be a recovery effort, My Lord. I… I’m not certain…” Zuko felt something break inside him at her stuttered words. Sokka was—they hadn’t even brought him home.

The servant looked like she’d been expecting anger, maybe, and was unprepared for this. She’d looked miserable coming in, but now she looked horrified too, and Zuko was ashamed of how quickly and viciously he thought _good_. That irrational anger curdled in his stomach, and he just felt sick, while she was watching him frozen like a rabbit-deer, still holding her bow. 

He shouldn’t—he was the Fire Lord, he shouldn’t be doing this, seen like this, even by a servant. Or maybe especially by a servant. He needed to do something, get himself under control, but he felt like his chest was collapsing in on itself, how could he possibly—

“Please leave me,” he said, so quietly he could hardly even hear himself. She straightened and fled as quickly as if the room was on fire. Zuko stood motionless, staring into the guttering flame of the candle he’d propped at the corner of the desk for extra light, watching the unhealthy shuddering of the flame with only a vague and distant understanding that that was him, breath too tight, too quick. Flickering.

Izumi was napping. Zuko wasn’t certain how long he’d been standing over her, brushing fingers over her hair, her cheeks. She was sleeping so peacefully, and it would be selfish, no matter how much he wanted to pick her up, to wake her up just so he could hold her—

She’d been asking for Sokka since he’d left for Cranefish Town, she’d been missing him, and Zuko didn’t know how to explain to a child that he wasn’t coming back. There were soft noises coming from the antechamber. The nurse that was watching Izumi always made herself scarce when they came by, but she never went far. 

Zuko pulled the door open to dismiss her. There was no point in making the woman stay, how could he possibly leave now? But when he pulled open the door, he faltered. Guilt climbed in his throat immediately, choking him. Zuko pulled the door closed behind him, with a quiet click.

“Suki,” Zuko said. It hadn’t even crossed his mind to find her, he’d been so swallowed up by his own grief. She’d heard the news, what, from the palace staff, gossiping within earshot of the guards? Suki was frozen in the doorway for only half a moment. Then she threw herself at him, and something heavy clattered against the table beside them as she dropped it and wrapped him in a hug. 

“I’m sorry, I should have…” he tried to say, but Suki just squeezed him so hard his breath left him for a moment. An uncomfortable heat pricked at the back of his eyes as he hunched and buried his face in her neck. 

She didn’t ask him if he was okay, which he appreciated, because he was—he was so far from okay, he wasn’t sure he’d ever be okay again. A hole had opened up in his chest, and everything inside of him was slowly sifting through it, draining him like an hourglass and leaving him empty and cold and—

Suki squeezed him again, and Zuko realized that he’d been shaking. He took a shuddering breath, with absolutely shameful breath control, and tried to pull himself together enough to raise his head from her shoulder. 

There was a box on the table. He stared at it, and her face turned grim and sad all at once. She wasn’t crying, but there were tracks in her makeup, smudged lines from her own private grieving. Zuko had never wanted to know anything less than he wanted to know what was inside that box, but… he couldn’t just ignore it. He reached out for it hesitantly and pushed the lid aside. 

It was Sokka’s sword, still in its sheath, but he could see the rusty flakes dried around the pommel. The sword was wrapped in a reddish-brown cloth. He reached out to tug it free and he realized, no, it wasn’t—it wasn’t reddish-brown, it was blue, and stained, and—

Zuko sucked in a breath, and the fabric between his fingers began to smoke. The force of his inhale stirred his smouldering rage. It burned through him as he stared at his husband’s shirt, torn and bloody and _sent to him in a box_ like some kind of trophy. Suki snatched his hand away before he could do anything rash, heedless of the heat, and the bloody shirt fell back into a pile on top of the box. Something clattered lightly against the floor, then, and Zuko stared at it, because… because that couldn’t possibly be what he thought it was. He stooped to pick up the necklace, staring at it and the bloody smear on the band as though he was somehow outside his body, watching some horrible play unfold in front of him. He ran his thumb over the pendant and felt the familiar ridges of it, the same grooves he’d run his thumb over a thousand times in the dark. Before he could stop himself he felt the stinging heat welling in his eyes. He swiped angrily at his cheeks, the necklace balled tightly in his fist.

“What happened?” Zuko asked. He’d been so overwhelmed earlier, he’d forgotten to ask. He needed to know. 

“They found blood on the docks. By the ferry,” she said. “They didn’t—find him. Didn’t know whose it was, at first, until someone at the summit noticed he was missing during the morning session.”

Zuko waited. Tried to breathe. 

“There’s more,” he said. 

“Yes,” she said. 

“Tell me,” he said, and he was infinitely grateful it was Suki, because she didn’t flinch, or demur, or bow. 

She just looked him straight in the eye and said, “The box was in his hotel room, addressed to you.”

The candle on the table flared wide enough that Suki took a half-step back. Zuko swept it out with a jerky motion, before the flame could jump from the holder, fist clenched so tight his nails left half-moon indents on his palm, like squeezing tight enough could both smother the flame and smother something else, too. 

This was his fault. Of course it was his fault. Who could ever want to target Sokka? Sokka was good, and kind, and if either of them deserved this it wasn’t him—

Zuko turned his back on the table, the box, because his stomach was churning and his face felt hot, and if he spent another moment looking at that sword and those clothes and imagining all of the things he could have done differently, he was going to—he didn’t know, he was going to—

Behind him, the lid rasped quietly as Suki slid it back on the box. He pressed the necklace flat against his chest and tried to breathe. She laid a hand on his shoulder, and it was the way her fingers trembled just slightly that snapped him out of it. 

He needed to keep it together. He needed to _do_ something. 

He needed to write the rest of his friends, before any more of them heard the news from someone else, like Suki had to. He owed them all that much. Suki watched him, as he crossed over to the desk and pulled out clean paper.

Aang should be at the Southern Air Temple. Zuko started with him. 

He left off the darker details. They’d want to know eventually, but writing them in a letter felt too impersonal. He didn’t think he could describe it with just words—he wasn’t certain there _were_ words to describe the numb chill that had settled over him. He folded the letter a little too quickly, leaving an inky smudge on the corner, and set it aside to start the next.

He sealed Toph’s letter, and then set to writing another note to accompany it, to warn her to take it somewhere private, and ask someone she trusted to read it to her. He couldn’t imagine she’d want her grief laid bare in public, but it still felt unfair, that she had to hear the news filtered through a stranger instead of directly from him. 

He wrote Katara’s letter last. Tried to. He felt like every thought he’d ever formed had left him, like all the grief and condolences and comforting phrases in the world could never be enough. The words stuck in his mind for a long time before he finally managed to put his brush to the page. The letter was simple, and to the point, his handwriting uncharacteristically sloppy.

At the bottom he wrote, _I will be leaving for Cranefish Town immediately_ , before the decision had even fully formed in his mind. He needed to see it for himself, and he was certain that as soon as they received his letters, the rest of his friends would drop everything to come. She was the only one close enough to meet him there. Toph, last Zuko had heard, was all the way in Ba Sing Se, and Aang couldn’t travel very quickly with Bumi with him. He didn’t want Katara to arrive in the Fire Nation to find him already gone.

Last he’d heard, she’d been in the former colonies, only a few hours sailing from Cranefish Town. His letter could reach her in under two hours if it was carried on an airship. He added the bit about his plan to leave immediately, paused, and thought to add more, but...

 _Just come_ , he wrote. She would know. Katara would know what he was planning to do.

“I have to see it for myself,” Zuko said. 

“I’m going with you,” Suki said. She stopped him before he could protest. “You’re not going without a guard,” she said, and meant _you shouldn’t be alone right now_. 

“Someone needs to stay with Izumi,” Zuko said. “I can’t bring her with me. But I can’t just—”

“I’ll ask the other warriors,” Suki said. “All of them. She’ll be the safest person in this spirits damned world, Zuko, you don’t have to worry.” 

Suki waited until he had sealed the last letter, and then without a word, she picked up the box and followed Zuko out.


	2. The Fire Lord’s Dog is Dead

Zuko spotted Katara from a distance, marching down the gangway of a colony trade ship. The moon was still low in the evening sky, climbing steadily over the water. It had only taken her a few hours to arrive in Cranefish Town from when she’d received his letter. The ship she’d traveled on must have made incredibly good time to arrive so quickly—they’d likely had a little more help than a favorable wind and swift currents, with Katara on board. 

Katara saw them almost immediately, hand tightening on her bag, leaning up over the heads of the other passengers. The Fire Lord and his guard were hard to miss, with Zuko still in his ornate palace robes, and Suki in her full Kyoshi Warrior uniform. As crowded as the streets were, they’d been given a wide berth all the way from where they’d docked the airship, through the streets, and to the council chambers. Zuko was certain that everyone in Cranefish Town must have heard what had happened, he could see the startled looks on passerby’s faces as they crossed paths. They all knew why he was here, and it made them shy away from him. He could only imagine what he looked like to them, because he _felt_ like a wraith, wandering the streets, lost and vengeful.

The Cranefish Town representatives were infuriatingly useless. The numb disbelief, the grief, had settled deep in his bones on the flight to the city. He’d only just this morning been happy and whole, and now he could feel nothing but that sick weight of his misery and the smoldering anger guttering in his lungs like embers. 

And… he knew this wasn’t proper, for the Fire Lord to be storming around through the city widely recognized as the origin of a budding republic, demanding answers as though he had any authority over them. He _knew that_ , but every moment wasted, with the person responsible running free, was a knife between his ribs, another inch of the blade sunk deeper. He didn’t care about their empty condolences, and he didn’t want to hear them. He wanted answers, and so far as he could tell, no one had seen Sokka leave, or where he had gone after, or how he’d ended up cornered on an empty dock in the middle of the night, and _no one had helped him_ —

So. They’d gotten nothing from the council, and Zuko could only be distantly guilty about the way that the lamps on their desks had flared ominously with his increasing frustration until Suki had finally insisted that he let her handle it and made him step outside.

Katara carried nothing with her, other than a small travel bag at her hip, and a coat, unbuttoned at the front and slightly too warm for the weather, as though she’d left the moment she’d received his letter without a single thought toward packing. Zuko had nearly done the same, but he and Suki had been spotted by his personal servant on their way to the aviary, and by the time they’d reached his private airship Hayoon had headed them off with hastily packed luggage for both of them. 

Katara threw herself at him without bothering to set her bag aside, the awkward lump of it pinned between them, the too-warm lining of her coat hood crushed against his cheek. Zuko turned his face against the soft fur, and for some reason he thought—Sokka had a coat just like it, that he hadn’t worn in… in almost half a year. Zuko hadn’t even gone with them on that trip, and Izumi had been so little then that he had no idea how much she even remembered from it. Zuko was suddenly, irrationally guilty that Sokka hadn’t had the chance to go more recently. They should have found the time to visit his father, visit Katara and Aang and their nephew, so he could see his family again, and now it was too late.

Zuko had expected her to start with questions. He knew how fiercely protective she was of her brother. He’d braced himself for blame and anger, as much as he held for himself. 

Instead she just squeezed him tightly and whispered, “It’s good to see you.”

Zuko thought he’d gotten... not _over it_ , but at least gotten himself under control, but the soft greeting against his shoulder had his eyes prickling again dangerously. He swallowed past the lump in his throat. 

“I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “Thank you for coming so quickly.”

“Of course,” she said. “You know I couldn’t just sit around and do nothing while...” 

Katara trailed off, shook her head against his shoulder like she wasn’t sure she could say it. She sounded tired, much more so than a few hours of travel justified. Zuko understood. He felt like all the energy had swept out of him like the tide during their flight, after the first few minutes of anxiety had given way to numbness. Katara brushed a thumb over his cheek and gave him a watery smile. 

Finally Katara leaned away slightly, and Zuko let her go. She waved Suki in for a hug, too, and then turned to look them both over for a moment.

“How did this happen?” Katara asked. 

“That’s what we’re here to find out,” Suki said. “It was late, and so far as we can tell, no one saw anything.” 

That made Katara frown. She readjusted her bag on her hip and crossed her arms.

“Sokka shouldn’t have even been alone,” Katara said. “He’s a prince. Someone must have seen _something_.” 

Sokka _was_ a prince, Zuko’s treacherous brain supplied. And she was right, he shouldn’t have been alone. Zuko should have been there, and maybe if he’d left his ministers to deal with each other and gone along with him, instead of letting Sokka insist he’d be fine for a few days alone, Sokka might still be—

“Hey,” Katara said. She touched his elbow, beyond gentle, and it still startled him like he’d been punched. “I didn’t mean—I meant, security. Not you. It wasn’t your fault.”

It was. They had made that clear from the start, sending Sokka’s bloody things to him in a box. But Zuko didn’t have it in him to argue with her. 

“He was supposed to have guards,” Zuko said. The mixed regret and anger threatened to choke him. “They lost sight of him during the party.” He tried to reign in his temper, regain a little control of his breath. That there was no rational, named target for his anger only made the feeling climb higher in his throat. Sokka had a bad habit of forgetting to tell his security where he was going, but that didn’t excuse them leaving him alone in a foreign city. “We’re still not certain if... that’s the truth.”

Suki had been extremely upset when she’d heard that his guard had lost him. Zuko knew that she was blaming herself for not sending one of the Kyoshi Warriors with him, or even accompanying Sokka herself. Of course Sokka would have resisted that, too, because Suki was meant to guard Zuko and Izumi in the palace. But they had been fine, the Fire Palace had been uneventful for all the days that he’d been absent, and Sokka had been left alone. 

All the little things they could have done differently kept tallying up in his mind, taunting him for not thinking of them before it was too late. 

“Okay, well. This is Sokka we’re talking about,” Katara said. Her arms were crossed very tightly over her chest. Zuko pretended not to hear the tremor in her voice. ”Who could have possibly wanted to hurt him?”

 _Anyone who would want to hurt me_ , Zuko thought. That felt like half the spirits damned world, on a bad day. The task of narrowing it down was impossibly daunting, but they couldn’t afford to start chasing wild goose-hares now, at least not before they had something to go on. 

“We don’t know yet,” Zuko said. “The city police have assigned someone to look into it. They said they’ll inform us as soon as they find any suspects, or… or if they find him.”

His voice betrayed him on those last few words, sticking roughly in his throat. Katara leaned in and pulled him into a hug again. It was comforting, with her fingers pressing into his shoulder blades. But then Katara blew a heavy breath, almost like a firebender. Steadying herself. 

She turned her face against his neck, voice low and carefully level. 

“...and what if we find these suspects first?” Katara murmured. 

“Katara,” Zuko said after a drawn pause. She hummed in acknowledgment, and he tried to keep calm, but he could feel the heat rising in his chest, and Katara was hugging him so tightly. He’d thought the same thing, on the airship, on the way back from the council chambers, the moment he’d heard, _of course he had_. This was why he’d needed Katara here, not just because she was close by, but because she _understood_. 

“When I find the people who are responsible for this, I’m going to _burn them all_ ,” Zuko said.

Katara sucked in a shallow breath, her fingers tightening near imperceptibly on his shoulders for a moment. She sighed, with something a little like relief. “ _We_ ,” she said fiercely. “We’re going to burn them all.”

Zuko nodded. Reluctantly, she sighed and pulled away, but not very far. 

“Have you spoken with the council members yet?” she asked.

“They were worthless,” Zuko said bitterly.

“And have you seen it?” she asked. Zuko shook his head. Katara studied his face for a moment. “Where?” 

“The dock on the other side of the canal,” Zuko said. “They’ve roped it off. And Suki, uh, _convinced_ them to shut down that part of the pier, too.”

“I asked nicely,” Suki said. 

“The ferry’s shut down, but there’s another one further up the river—oh,” Zuko said, as Katara wasted no time pushing with both hands, sweeping forward to create an ice floe in the water. She hopped on without preamble, barely swaying as the platform bobbed in the waves. 

“We’re not waiting for the ferry,” Katara said.

The docks were eerily quiet, empty and sectioned off from the rest of the pier. The guards posted on the road had taken one look at them as they approached the dock from the opposite shore and made themselves scarce. Zuko stared out over the dark bay, illuminated only by the light of the moon. It could have been pretty, but now it only looked ominous. And the thought of Sokka out there, alone over the water—

No, he couldn’t do it. He forced the thought away.

They followed the dock to where the abandoned ferry was still moored, the inside of the cabin dark. Zuko lit a flame in the palm of his hand and held it out for them as they crossed the last few salt sprayed steps. 

Zuko stopped, rooted to the spot, and stared at the dark stain that had soaked into the wood in front of the ferry. The dock was so narrow, and it was dark, even by the light of the moon it was dark, and yesterday had been more overcast than this. He tried to imagine Sokka out on the end of this empty pier, how he’d gotten to that point, why he was alone, if he’d been chased or ambushed and by whom, and the weight of all of his questions settled so hot and tight in his chest that he could feel the flame in his palm surge, just a moment, before he managed to take a breath. 

Surely Suki and Katara noticed, but they kindly said nothing. Suki knelt next to the stain and brushed her fingers against the wood. He looked where she traced her index finger, and saw that the edge of it had been smeared, like—

“They threw him in the water,” Suki said quietly, and that… he hadn’t even considered, but, suddenly he could hardly breathe past the knot tightening in his chest. Spirits, had they killed him first? There was so much blood, but had he… was he still breathing, when they’d dragged him to the water, thrown him in, and left him to drown? The thought choked him, and Zuko forced himself to turn out over the inky stretch of the bay, and count each desperate breath with the pulse of the waves washing over the shore until he could get himself under control. 

Had he washed up on some beach somewhere, or had the Ocean Spirit claimed him and pulled out to sea?

“We’ll find him,” Katara said, as though reading his thoughts. 

She was peering up at the sky, and he followed her gaze. The moon was full tonight. That felt like—something. A sign, maybe, from the spirits, from the moon herself, Zuko didn’t know. They were going to find out who did this. 

This side of the bay was empty, beyond the ferry and a few small boats moored at the docks. Across the river, Zuko could see several dark shadows slipping over the water, and the fire-lit silhouettes of ships docking on the other side of the canal, backlit by the city’s lights. None of the sounds of the city reached them here beyond the gentle lapping of the waves against the dock. 

Katara swept her arms into a loose stance. With a sharp flick of her wrist, she knifed across the water, pulling and lifting as though to cut the bay in half. On their side of the bay, buried in the shadows of the empty pier, away from the ships and the traffic of the other shore, Katara shifted, and pulled back, and with a tidal rhythm slowly, slowly, began to drain the bay.

Zuko watched her, the drawn concentration on her face, the determined twist of her mouth, until the wave began to build and draw back away from the shore. He cast his gaze over the empty seabed, raking over the shadows of distant debris, seaweed, litter washed from the river mouth, but… nothing. 

He was simultaneously relieved and gutted, to not see any sign of Sokka there. He turned, and he could see the way Suki was looking, stretching her gaze to the mouth of the bay where the tides swept out from the shores and away. Zuko shook his head, breathless. The thought of it alone made him claustrophobic, even if he knew that a burial at sea was the Water Tribe’s way, the image of Sokka rolling under the cold and dark pressure of the waves was too much. He cast his gaze down, at the dock, and the seabed below. 

A flicker of gold caught the moonlight. Zuko froze. 

With the water pulled back, it was a long drop from the dock to the seabed. Zuko jumped without hesitation. He landed heavily in the thick silt that had washed from the mouth of the canal, and under the shadow of the receding water, Zuko fed the flame in his palm to cast a wider glow. Startled turtle crabs shied away from the light, but Zuko ignored them, boots dragging through the muddy dregs of the bay. The hem of his robe was ruined in moments. He didn’t care. 

Something glinted on the seabed, half buried in the silt. Zuko dug his fingers through the muck and pulled it free. 

It was a Kyoshi Warrior’s fan. 

Zuko stared at it, and tried to make some sense of it. It wasn’t—it wasn’t Sokka’s. Sokka’s fans were at home, in the weapons vault by the training ground. Zuko knew they were, because he’d seen them that morning, what felt like another lifetime ago, when he’d risen at dawn to practice with his dual dao.

The fan was in good condition. He flicked it closed and open again, and the joints didn’t protest. There was no wear from the tides where the waves should have battered it against the sand. The outside was still shiny and polished, not the dull lifeless thing he’d expect from the rest of the trash littering the canal.

It hadn’t been in the water long. 

Zuko stared at it and he knew, he _knew_ that it hadn’t. As clearly as though he was watching it all unfold in front of him, he knew that whoever had come after Sokka had been carrying it, and sometime in the scuffle, they had dropped it in the water. Sometime between stalking him to the pier and now, a Kyoshi Warrior had murdered Sokka, stolen his sword, his jacket, his _betrothal necklace_ , and dumped his body in the bay like the piles of garbage littering the canal.

The fan glowed red hot in his hand, and under the grip of his thumb the metal twisted, it buckled, until it was too hot to hold even for him. He dropped the fan in the mud, and it shrieked and spat in the shallow water as it cooled. Zuko sucked a breath through his teeth, a tongue of flame lashing from his mouth. He didn’t understand _how_. He trusted them, Suki trusted them, this had to be… who could have possibly...?

All he could taste was ash, smoke burned in his lungs, and he couldn’t catch his breath. It played in his mind, Sokka alone, on the docks, afraid, turning and seeing—

Suki dropped into the mud beside him, and Zuko whirled so quickly that she startled back.

“Explain this to me,” he said, voice dangerously low, throat raw from the heat coiling in his lungs. He trusted her, of course he trusted Suki, but spirits, what the fuck was he supposed to think—?

Suki looked confused. She turned, followed the line of his finger to where he was pointing and her face just—collapsed.

“This is…” Suki stooped to pick it up, flinched slightly at the quickly dissipating heat as she scooped it off the seabed. “Is this Sokka’s?”

“No,” Zuko said. “It belongs to someone else.”

She stared at him, wide-eyed, as his meaning settled in her mind. Then she turned her gaze back down to the fan, and her face twisted. He’d never seen Suki so furious. 

“It’s _not_ one of ours,” Suki said, with viciously certainty. 

“But someone else? Someone you don’t know?” Zuko asked. 

“I don’t… know. It could be,” she said. Suki hesitated, caught her lip between her teeth. With less certainty, she added, “Maybe, during the war, when I left… not everyone finishes their training. Some choose to leave. And after the village burned—” she cut herself off there, but she didn’t have to, it had already slotted into place in Zuko’s mind, with the sword and the necklace with a note addressed to him, _his fault, again and again_.

“It could be,” Suki settled on, finally, and left it at that. 

Zuko had left his daughter in the care of the Kyoshi Warriors. He trusted them. He trusted _Suki_ , but they had no way of knowing that they needed to be wary of any other warriors outside their tight ranks. They had to return to Caldera City tonight. 

The thought of leaving without Sokka was horrible, it had twisted deep into the hollow space beneath his ribs and dug its hooks into Zuko’s heart, but he didn’t have a _choice_ , not when their daughter was back home waiting for him.

Suki was staring darkly at the fan, the same grim realization likely passing through her mind. Zuko stared at it, too, thought of the person it belonged to, walking free, and what they’d done, unanswered for, and felt the awful barbs in his chest burn away with the heat of his anger. 

“When we find them,” Zuko said, spitting embers, with the smoke and the heat pressing against his teeth, “they will wish they’d finished that training. Because they are going to need it.”

The evening was, apparently, something of a celebration. 

Sokka’s wound may have been a bit more serious than he’d thought, because a bone-weary exhaustion had set in by the time he’d patched himself up last night. He slept straight through the morning, straight through the afternoon, too, and woke up vaguely grateful that no one had come to stab him in his sleep, because, yeah, he absolutely would not have noticed.

He’d also slept in his makeup, reluctant to take it off lest someone recognize him, so it was an absolute mess to fix before he could go out. Every movement pulled at his shoddily patched wound, and the bandages had been spotted with blood by the time he was done. The blood stains on his Kyoshi Warrior’s robe were a little harder to deal with. He scrubbed out the worst of them and called it good enough, though there was still a faint discoloration of the fabric around the hastily stitched hole in the front.

They waited until night had fallen, and the fishery employees and the dock workers had all gone home. Sokka counted their number as they arrived with a sinking sort of dread. There were… a lot more of them than he’d expected, so many that there wasn’t really even space to seat them all. He had planned to keep his head down, to get an idea of who he was dealing with, but it became quickly apparent that that wouldn’t be happening. Dressed as he was, there wasn’t a person here who didn’t recognize him as the one who’d killed, well, himself.

Sokka picked out a handful of people that he recognized as guests from the reception last night, though thankfully no council members. He supposed that explained the strange tension he’d noticed at the party. They really must have been following him from the start of the evening, waiting for their moment. Thankfully none of them seemed to recognize him now, though that didn’t do much to ease his worry. Who had invited them to the reception? Someone from the council? He had no way to know if they’d managed to weasel-snake their way onto the guest list on their own, or if they’d had help. 

It only took a little eavesdropping to tell how deeply these people resented not only the Fire Nation, but everyone who had come together after the war, to build forward into a new era of peace. Spirits, the things he’d heard said about Zuko even in the first fifteen minutes of being here were enough to really test his resolve. He’d bit his tongue to keep his cover, but only barely. To them, the fact that the rest of the world hadn’t torn the Fire Nation to pieces after the war, until their citizens had suffered as the other nations had suffered for one hundred years, was an injustice they couldn’t reconcile. 

Never mind that the citizens of the Fire Nation had been hurt by the war in different ways. Never mind that there would never be harmony between the nations for as long as they favored revenge over justice.

These people clearly didn’t want harmony. They wanted a reckoning. The sentiment reminded him of the Freedom Fighters, except the Freedom Fighters had been teenagers, deeply hurt by a war they had no control over. These people were adults, the war was long over, and they knew exactly what they were doing, pulling at the threads of their peaceful coexistence, hoping to see it unravel. They’d targeted Sokka even though he’d done nothing to them, just because he… represented their idea of the enemy, maybe, as someone who was trying to move forward while they clung to the past. 

The door to the fishery floor had swung open again while Sokka wasn’t paying attention. He’d been distracted, pretending to listen to another man toast the Kyoshi Warrior’s good health and Sokka’s demise, and staring very resolutely at his own drink. It was half full, but only because he had been steadily pouring it out when no one was looking—he’d learned that lesson yesterday, thank you very much.

He glanced up at the commotion and saw that Amai had returned. He caught her gaze, and she seemed almost unhappy to see him. Sokka wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean, if she still didn’t trust him, or if she was bothered by the amount of attention he was getting. Maybe she was jealous. He must have recounted how he’d killed himself a dozen times by now—mostly the truth, beyond that very last sword strike—and it was… concerning, how quickly that endeared him to the rest of them, like the whole crowd was desperate for blood.

Maybe Amai was just wary of how eager they were to talk to him—and rightly so, because they were making this reconnaissance pretty easy on him. The whole evening was a strange facsimile of the sorts of courtly functions and diplomatic meetings that he’d had years of experience with by now. 

And Sokka was _good_ at this sort of thing—mostly because Zuko wasn’t, and much preferred to avoid the two-faced schmoozing altogether. After a few years of marriage, Sokka had a lot of practice sliding in to pick up the slack and save his husband the headache. He’d learned to spot the ones who were seeking favor, to spot the ones who knew more than the others, the trusted ones and the ones looking to work their way into the inner circle, who he could get information out of and who he couldn’t. It really wasn’t much different from a Fire Palace court function, in the end. 

So of course, it was easy to spot their leader in the crowd. 

He’d arrived with Amai. Sokka had seen Hato run up to him at the door. He’d pointed him out immediately, so at the very least he could relax knowing that Tolon wasn’t familiar enough with the Kyoshi Warrior to recognize him as an impostor on sight. Sokka wasn’t sure if he wanted to press his luck with a conversation, but he hadn’t come this far just to hide in the corner. The sooner he learned what they were planning, the sooner he could find a chance to sneak away, warn his husband, and put a stop to them.

He noted, from the corner of his eye, when Tolon flicked a glance his way, as though checking to see whether Sokka had noticed him. Sokka made a point to keep his seat, fingers tracing the lip of his drink. He waited. It wasn’t long before Tolon made his way over to him on his own. 

He wasn’t a particularly tall man, or any better dressed than the rest of the men who’d filtered into the room in the last hour. They all looked like normal citizens to him, working class. Tolon’s dress was just as modest, the sort of tunic that would look somewhat strange in Ba Sing Se, but blended well with the fashion of the colonies, hair pulled up in a tight fishtail braid. But it wasn’t his unassuming looks that had let Sokka pick him out of the crowd. He could see the way the rest of them were drawn to him. Up close he did have a charming sort of face, though there was a sharpness to his grin that Sokka didn’t like. It was the kind of expression he’d seen on some of the older ministers and generals in the Fire Palace, the sort of expectation of respect that made Sokka wonder what he thought he’d done to deserve it. Tolon dropped into the seat next to him without introducing himself.

“What’s your name?” he asked. 

“It’s…” Sokka faltered. Oh, shit. No one had asked him for a name yet. He’d forgotten he needed one of those. 

Right, yes, what _was_ his name? Not Suki, they might have heard of Suki. Just a normal name for a Kyoshi warrior, uh… Kyoshi? No, that was stupid, what about... 

“Shi—kyo?” he said.

Nailed it. 

“Seems you’ve made yourself quite popular, Shikyo,” he said. Sokka shrugged. “Come on, don’t be shy. Thanks to you, the Fire Lord’s dog is dead.”

Sokka grimaced and raised his glass. “Good riddance,” he said, to scattered jeers around the table. 

They hadn’t recovered a body, but Sokka had overheard earlier that his alleged murder had been discovered. It was a small relief to know that they’d fully believed his lie. The blood on his coat, his sword, and his necklace had apparently been enough. Which reminded him..

“What did you do with his things?” Sokka asked. Maybe once he’d learned what they were planning, he could steal his sword and necklace back and get out of here. 

Tolon’s mouth quirked into a wry smirk.

“Returned it to the grieving husband, of course. And wouldn’t you know, he was so grateful, he’s already deigned to pay our humble city a visit,” he said.

A chill swept through him. He’d known that the news of his death would spread quickly as soon as he’d heard it was discovered, but the guilt of them returning his blood-soaked belongings to Zuko lanced through him so suddenly he felt ill. For one awful moment he thought of Zuko, devastated and furious and so desperate for answers, and he had to force the thought away before the guilt of it could drag him under. 

Was this what they’d wanted his body for? To taunt his husband with it? And now his sword and his necklace had lured Zuko here, out of the safety of the Fire Palace. He wasn’t—he couldn’t possibly have come alone, he must have at least brought Suki with him, but the thought of someone out there stalking Zuko in the streets the same way they’d stalked him last night made Sokka’s chest tighten with dread. 

And—shit, Tolon had definitely noticed his reaction. He cleared his throat. 

“Do you think it’s wise, to bait him like that?” Sokka asked, as though that was all that worried him.

Tolon grinned wolfishly. “At the end of the day, he’s just one man,” he said. “He’ll see that soon enough.” It took everything in him to keep his expression neutral, to ignore the clear threat in those words. Sokka raised an impassive eyebrow, hummed skeptically. 

Tolon snorted, faintly, in amusement. “You’ll see soon enough, too,” he said, this time less of a threat, and more of a promise. 

“Was that your plan? Lure him out of the palace, then kill him like the other one?” Sokka asked. He wasn’t sure how Tolon was going to manage that. It seemed… unrealistic, that Zuko wouldn’t be on high-alert now, with Sokka’s supposed killer still on the loose in the streets of Cranefish Town. 

Tolon hummed thoughtfully. “I had considered it, once,” he admitted. “Unfortunately, certain circumstances have changed. It needs to be done in the palace.”

“Circumstances?” Sokka asked. He was pushing it, he knew he was, but the way Tolon had said the word felt significant, like there was something important there if only Sokka could get him to tilt his hand. 

Tolon only shook his head. “You don’t have to worry about that. I’ll be handling it myself.”

Before Sokka could respond to that, someone swore, loud enough to carry over the din of voices. Sokka glanced over at them almost distractedly, then hesitated when he saw that several of the other celebrators were abandoning their drinks, shifting toward the windows. Sokka spared Tolon a glance and then followed them, curious, as their murmuring took on a distinctly nervous edge. 

Sokka stared, and tried to make sense of what he was looking at.

The water was slowly receding from the bay. Sokka’s heart leapt at the sight of it, as it swept back and pulled toward the ocean. _Tsunami_ , he thought immediately, and he felt a little spike of fear run through him, but then… but then the water seemed to pull up as though on its own, and kept rising, until it had coalesced into an black wall of water glittering against the light of the full moon, perfectly still like a held breath, and it hit him. 

Katara. 

“It’s his sister,” Sokka said, startling several of them to look at him with confusion. “She’s emptying the bay. They’re looking for the body.”

Sokka’s chest tightened as he stared out at the wave. Would they find the assassin’s body? Sokka wasn’t sure what he hoped for more, that they would find something, or that they wouldn’t. He could only imagine what they’d think, finding a body that wasn’t his. Would they begin to suspect, or would they simply think he’d taken her down with him?

But the woman had sunk when he’d thrown her in, and while the bay was partly protected from the pull of the sea, if it hadn’t washed up on shore after a whole day in the water it had probably been caught in a current and swept out to the open ocean. 

Even if he was alone now, it was… comforting, in a way, to know that Zuko and Katara were so close, more so to know they were together, able to look out for each other. He felt selfish for it, and the guilt of knowing why they were here, imagining how they must be feeling right now, burrowed deep inside of him. But he couldn’t afford to go down that road, because more attention was turning on him as the reality of that wall of water sweeping across the bay—and the raw power it took to control a wave that size—settled into their minds. 

Spirits, these guys were out of their depths. The levity they’d felt in murdering a man on the docks had very quickly soured, seeing what they were up against now. Sokka glanced around at the lot of them and wondered how they’d found themselves here, and whether they’d really thought it through when they’d chosen to follow a man like Tolon.

“Her brother was murdered. You didn’t expect her to come looking for the people who are responsible?” Sokka asked.

They might have been celebrating his death as though they’d won some great battle, but the thought of a real battle now was beginning to dawn on them. A few of them shifted, pale faces staring out at the water. They seemed uncertain. 

Not all of them looked shaken, though. A few of them had barely spared the window a glance before returning to their drinks. Sokka noted their faces, and set them apart in his mind. 

And there was nothing uncertain about Tolon, either. He stood resolutely, and the rest of the men turned to him. He looked unbothered, smug almost, and Sokka could see already that his confidence was affecting them. He was… charming, but Sokka could see the edge to it, and the way he wielded his conviction like a knife.

“We knew we were unlikely to get the Fire Lord alone here,” Tolon said. “We’ve accounted for it. The plan stays the same. This changes nothing.” 

The words settled cold as ice under Sokka’s skin. His heart quickened as he met the man’s gaze. He knew… it made sense that they were targeting Zuko, with how much they hated the Fire Nation, but the mention of a plot that Sokka wasn’t privy to made him anxious. They’d dealt with assassination attempts, before, although these were the first people to try to use Sokka to get to Zuko. He needed to learn what they were planning before it was too late to stop them.

“I don’t know, Tolon,” someone said. “He’s right there on the docks. Why not now?”

“No,” Tolon said, sounding amused. “I don’t think we’ll be fighting the master waterbender during a full moon. We’ve already made arrangements to move to Caldera City. We’ll stick to the plan, and the Fire Lord will be seeing his husband soon.” 

“What _is_ the plan?” Sokka had to ask. Half the assassination attempts that were thwarted didn’t even make it past the walls first. “You’re really going to try to kill the Fire Lord in his own palace?”

“I have contacts in Caldera who will help us,” Tolon said. “You just worry about keeping that blade sharp.”

“That’s—” Absurd, he wanted to say, and idiotic, but most of all, “Why risk it?” 

Tolon didn’t seem offended by the question. He seemed happy for the opportunity to hold court, leaning up and projecting to the room at large even as he directed his questions at Sokka. 

“Tell me,” Tolon said. “The Fire Lord burned your village to the ground when he was a teenager. Did he ever apologize? Make reparations?”

Zuko _had_ apologized. He’d also offered to help rebuild their village after the war, almost immediately after his coronation was finalized. Then, when he’d learned that Kyoshi Island was perfectly self-sufficient and had completed their own repairs months ago, he’d shifted to offering to cover their costs, all the while awkwardly apologizing at every chance he’d been given. It was honestly a bit much, but was very charming to watch, and had been one of the things that endeared the Kyoshi Warriors to him, back before they’d joined the Fire Palace Royal Guard. 

(Suki still hadn’t let him live it down, though.)

But of course, Tolon wasn’t looking for the truth. He was looking for the answer that furthered his agenda. For Tolon, the correct answer was—

“No,” Sokka said. “Some of the other Kyoshi Warriors may have forgotten, but I haven’t.”

Tolon nodded thoughtfully. “Boys like that do not grow into good men,” he said. 

Sokka tensed, just slightly, at those words. He drew a slow breath, and let it go. It took everything in him to not protest how _wrong_ he was, to keep his expression neutral, as the man continued. 

“It was the Avatar’s duty to bring Fire Lord Ozai to justice, and he was too weak even for that,” he said. “Instead, he put Ozai’s son on the throne. For as long as that family clings to power, the Fire Nation will never see the justice it deserves.” 

What he was talking about was another war, and likely not a small one. He _had_ to know that, if he was planning to kill both the Fire Lord and Sokka, who was both the Fire Prince and the son of the Southern Water Tribe’s chief. He couldn’t say any of that, except...

“Seems ambitious,” Sokka said. “The Fire Lord is going to be a lot harder to kill than a single non-bender.”

Tolon eyed him shrewdly for a long moment. Then, he smiled. 

“I’m nothing if not an ambitious man,” he said. 

They left for Caldera City only hours later, in the dead of night. 

Zuko had already gone. He’d watched the light of their airship pass over them against the darkened sky not long after the bay had returned to its quiet calm. It seemed… Sokka thought they’d given up a little quickly, so maybe they’d found something. The thought worried him more than anything, as the light of the airship’s burners faded into the distance.

Amai broke up the revelry shortly after, sending men scattering with half-full drinks in hand to gather supplies. Tolon had watched them with an arm slung over the back of his chair, without ever really joining the celebration, and then he’d slipped out the back door without a word.

Sokka wanted to follow him, but—

“Take this to the ship,” Amai said. “If you’re coming, you carry your own shit.” She dropped a bag on the table in front of Hato. The kid had tagged along after him all evening, a little too swept up in his recount of his own murder on the dock. It seemed Sokka was the only one who would tolerate his questions, so he’d been plastered to his side all night, asking, _how many years did you train, what weapons do you use, are you a good teacher, no I’m just wondering—_

Amai held out a second bag to Sokka by the strap. 

Their fingers brushed when Amai handed it over to him, and... Ah. Sokka kept his expression level as she pulled her hand away.

“Hato will show you where it is,” she said. Sokka watched her go, and then turned to follow Hato as they picked gingerly across the fishery floor and into the fresh night air. Sokka cast a glance toward the ocean, but the tide had already returned to normal. 

“So,” Sokka said. Maybe he should have felt bad, about the way the kid perked up at even the promise of a conversation, but he could only find it in himself to worry that this could go wrong very quickly, if the kid took issue with his questions. “If Tolon hates the Fire Nation so much, why does he hang out with a firebender?” 

Hato sent him a wide-eyed look.

“What, was that a secret?” Sokka asked. Most of them, from what he could tell from their stances and the way they moved, were probably earthbenders. But he’d noticed how warm Amai’s fingers were when they brushed hands. As someone with considerable experience shaking hands with firebenders, and, you know, doing other things with one too, he’d come to recognize that slightly-warmer body temperature easily. It had just been a hunch, but Hato’s reaction confirmed it. 

“No,” Hato said, elongating the ‘o’ enough that Sokka was fairly certain he was lying. “She just—told me not to mention it. Don’t let her think I told you.”

“It's kind of my job to notice details like that,” Sokka said. He resisted the urge to make a face, when that comment made Hato turn his starry-eyed gaze on him. Sokka had the sinking feeling that he was a murderous role model, now. “Amai doesn’t trust me, does she?” 

“I think she just doesn’t know if you’re only here because Tolon paid you to kill the prince, or if you’re really loyal to the cause,” Hato said. 

Sokka hummed and said, “She doesn’t _like_ me much, either.”

“Ah,” Hato said. “I think… that’s probably just because she wanted to do it herself.”

“What, kill the prince?” Sokka asked. Hato nodded. “Why?”

“Because Tolon asked her to,” Hato said.

“Well,” Sokka said after a moment. They arrived at the edge of the dock. The water in the bay had settled back into a calm lapping against the shore, although the gangplank was hanging at a strange angle, probably jostled by the draining and refilling of the bay. Sokka kicked it until it was no longer crooked. 

“She’ll be getting another chance soon, won’t she?” Sokka asked, and with private certainty, he vowed to never let that happen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part of the Zuko and Katara exchange in this one was inspired by [this art by @sword-over-water on tumblr,](https://sword-over-water.tumblr.com/post/623457350091669504/shikyo-taking-care-of-certain-people-on-the-way) so you should definitely go check it out :)


	3. Haven’t You Ever Died Before?

Zuko could hear Izumi babbling the moment they walked into the nursery. She was now reaching the age where her eagerness to talk largely outweighed the number of words that she knew, and she was much more concerned with being paid attention to than she was with making sense. They’d adopted Izumi from a family that was fostering her in the colonies, but due to the nature of her adoption, they didn’t know exactly how old she was. They had the court physician’s best guess to go off of, and then the age she’d started talking seemed to line up with his estimates, and she’d taken to chattering like a turtleduck to water.

Sokka was great at keeping up with her babble, able to hold a conversation with her as though everything she was saying was perfectly logical, and always correcting her in a way that made her giggle, not get frustrated with him. The thought made Zuko’s breath catch in his throat, watching her, because… because it was just him now, wasn’t it? And she was just… she was so small, and she had so much more growing to do. Sokka was going to miss all of it. 

Izumi glanced up and saw him. Zuko forced his grief down and smiled for her.

When Suki had said she was going to assign all of the Kyoshi Warriors to watching Izumi, she had apparently not been exaggerating. They were spread over every desk and chair. The sight of them, and of Izumi safe and happy, was a soft relief he hadn’t realized he was waiting for. Izumi grinned when she saw him, but her face absolutely lit up when she saw Katara. She wriggled in the Kyoshi Warrior’s arms, reaching out for her. Izumi’s hands immediately went to Katara’s hair loops when she picked her up.

Suki nodded to Zuko, just slightly. They’d discussed their next steps on the flight home. She needed to talk to the warriors alone, to see if any of them had any insight on what they’d found. Suki had the warped fan stored in her pocket, and the angry determination to use it, hopefully, to find answers. If any of them suspected something was wrong when Suki ordered them to follow her, they were too well-trained to voice it. After a moment they had all filed out of the room.

“So Po?” Izumi asked Katara. She looked at her expectantly, like she ought to know exactly what that meant. So far Zuko, Sokka, and Izumi’s nursemaid were the only ones who could really understand what Izumi meant most of the time, aside from one shockingly coherent conversation she’d managed with Azula the last time they’d gone to visit her. Katara shot Zuko a quizzical look, delicately untangling Izumi’s fingers from her hair.

Zuko translated, “She thinks you came from the South Pole.”

Sokka had taken Izumi for a short visit to the South Pole months ago, because Katara and Bumi were visiting at the same time, and they’d wanted to surprise their father. Izumi had still been pretty little then, but the association had stuck in her mind. Now every time they mentioned Katara, she’d start asking about the South Pole again.

Izumi let Katara’s hair go, patting one chubby hand against her cheek as though to get her attention. “So Po?” she asked again. 

“No, no South Pole,” Katara said.

Izumi frowned. She glanced over Katara’s shoulder, tilting sideways to look. 

“No?” she asked. 

“No,” Katara said. “I was visiting an island near the Earth Kingdom. Now I’m here to see my favorite niece.”

Izumi looked at her for a moment, then frowned deeper. She glanced back over her shoulder again, and this time Zuko turned to see what she was looking at. She was frowning at the door, with a tiny, confused expression on her face.

She was—she was looking for Sokka. Because the last time she’d seen Katara, it had been Sokka who’d taken her to the South Pole, and now she thought… she probably thought that that was where he was all this time, and why he wasn’t here now. Seeing Katara had gotten her hopes up. A little bubble of disappointment flickered across her face when the door didn’t open. Katara seemed confused, but then she turned to him to ask about it, and she saw the expression on Zuko’s face. 

“Oh,” Katara said, understanding dawning on her, and quickly shifting into hurt. “Oh, sweetheart.”

“She misses him,” Zuko said. “She—I don’t know how to explain.” 

Zuko wasn’t even sure that she was able to understand that Sokka was gone, and that he wasn’t coming back, and certainly not the reason why, even if she had noticed his absence. Izumi was watching Katara carefully, like she wasn’t quite sure what to make of her reaction. She patted her cheek again, this time more gentle, with a serious look of concentration. Her expression was a perfect mirror of Katara’s, sad and troubled and altogether out of place on her tiny face. 

“You miss your dad, huh?” Katara said after a long moment. She blinked, breathed to steady herself, and swept a curl of Izumi’s hair from her forehead. Quietly, she said, “We miss him, too.”

Caldera City was uncomfortably humid. Sokka could feel himself beginning to sweat even as the ship approached the harbor, and he missed the breeze off the water the moment they made landfall. They broke into smaller groups from the dock, to avoid drawing as much attention to themselves. The Kyoshi Warrior’s robe was a bit too heavy for the heat, still worn over the same clothes he’d picked for the much cooler Cranefish Town weather.

Sokka could have shed the Kyoshi Warrior’s uniform and slipped away. He probably knew the city better than any of them. It would be easy to disappear into the crowd before anyone noticed he was gone. From there it would have taken minutes, winding through the streets he’d walked hundreds of times, to meet the baffled guards at the gates. He could walk right back into the Fire Nation Palace, kiss his husband, hug his daughter—

He didn’t. He couldn’t, no matter how much he wanted to. Because if he left now, and someone else ended up dead tomorrow, he would never forgive himself.

The streets were lined with paper lanterns, burning on every street corner, hanging from every shop and street lamp and open apartment window, all ornately decorated, delicately painted with prayers to Agni, and positioned with care, so that the whole city was awash with red and gold and the gentle glow they cast off, even under the midday sun.

He’d been living in the Fire Nation for years now. He knew what a Fire Nation funeral looked like, and what a vigil looked like. The news of his death had clearly spread. Sokka’s stomach twisted under the weight of his deception. This was… much more extravagant than anything he’d ever seen. And, no, he’d never seen a royal funeral before, but even to him, even when it was _for_ him, this felt excessive. 

Sokka craned his neck around to look at them, and then abruptly realized how stupid that was. He’d been lucky so far, that he hadn’t met anyone who might recognize him through the face paint, but there were plenty of people in Caldera City who might know him if they paid attention. All it took was one guard, tailor, or politician to look a little too closely, and his cover would be blown.

Amai noticed how quickly he’d turned away from the lanterns, but the look she was giving him wasn’t a suspicious one. She rolled her eyes at him. 

“Don’t tell me you’re feeling guilty?” she asked. Sokka frowned, for a moment caught off guard, because of course he was feeling guilty, but _she_ shouldn’t know that. She raised an eyebrow, and nodded to the lanterns. Right. She thought he was guilty for the murder. He cast a glance back at one of the lanterns, still burning despite the midday heat. He shook his head, shrugged. 

“Waste of paper, if you ask me,” Amai said. “Let the family light a candle like the rest of us. He wasn’t even _Fire Nation_ , so why—”

“Uh, Amai?” Hato said. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this here?” 

She rolled her eyes again, but let it drop. It was probably overcautious. No one cared what a couple of strangers were talking about on the street. 

Sokka glanced at the lanterns again, taking in the sheer number of them. A whole city in mourning. 

“Probably a good idea,” Sokka mumbled. He ducked his head again, on the off chance someone thought to look his way, and saw something beyond one of the Fire Lord’s security out for a stroll. 

The downtown market was actually fairly empty for this time of day, with the humid heat pushing everyone inside. Amai wound her way through the streets as confidently as Sokka might have, if he wasn’t busy pretending he’d never seen the place before, until they’d passed through the market and into one of the neighborhoods known for its street food. She clearly knew where she was going. He wondered whether she was so confident because she had gone over the maps beforehand, or if she had been to Caldera City before.

Amai turned down a side street and cut into the alley alongside one of the shops. She knocked on the door, but didn’t bother waiting for an answer before pushing inside, with the rest of the group following on her heels. 

Sokka did not immediately follow her. Instead Sokka stopped on the street in front of the restaurant, stared at the very familiar storefront of his favorite noodle shop, and frowned.

Oh, Suki and Ming were going to be so smug about this. 

They already insisted on tagging along every single time Zuko and Sokka went out together, no matter how much Sokka complained about them cramping his style, or Zuko insisted that they could take care of each other just fine. 

Now one of their favorite date spots was, apparently, being used to plot an assassination attempt. Oh, this might actually be more painful than getting stabbed. Sokka glared sullenly at the display, where the special of the day was his favorite spicy noodles with pickled tomato-carrots, like it had personally been holding the sword. 

(Why did it have to be the _good_ noodle shop?)

Going inside didn’t actually help much with the heat. They cut through the kitchen, where big pots of water were boiling on the stove, waiting for orders, so that the whole room was even more humid than outside. The last of the group was already making her way down into the cellar by the time Sokka followed them. He turned his face away from the cooks in the kitchen, just in case any of them happened to look at him too closely, and shuffled down the stairs. 

The cellar was surprisingly large. There was a sliding shutter on the door at the bottom of the stairs, the sort that the White Lotus used for their call and response. Sokka regretted, briefly, that he’d missed whatever that password was, but he’d just have to hope they could force their way through, when he came back with the guards once this was over. 

Unlike the fishery in Cranefish Town, the inside of the noodle shop cellar looked exactly like the sort of den of iniquity he’d been expecting. The back wall was stacked with barrels, which Sokka had a sinking suspicion contained something a bit more inflammatory than tomato-carrots or rice flour. There were documents laid out on the far table. Sokka only got a quick glance, because he didn’t want to seem too curious, but he’d definitely spotted a surprisingly detailed map of the inner Fire Palace grounds, and what looked like a guard roster, at least, among the pile of pages. It looked… curated.

Sokka glanced, casually, at one of the men unpacking supplies into the cellar stores and said, “This seems… involved. Forgive me for being new to all of this, but, uh, how long have you been planning this, exactly?”

“Over a year,” the man said. “Tolon’s changed some things, but the plan is solid. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

Over a year. He’d been eating delicious, traitorous noodles for over a year. How many times had he dragged Zuko here? They could have poisoned him a dozen times by now—maybe the only reason they hadn’t was self-preservation, knowing how easily an assassination attempt in their own shop would point back to them. Or maybe… Tolon himself had mentioned that the plan had needed to change, whatever those _circumstances_ were, so maybe there was another reason they’d held back…

Sokka watched Tolon shake hands with the owner with what he was sure was a very poorly hidden pinched expression. Personal, devastating betrayals aside, Sokka had work to do. He turned away from where the owner was, just in case, and busied himself with unpacking.

They filtered inside in groups of three and four, most of them the same crowd that had come with them from Cranefish Town, although Sokka picked out a few new faces. The noodle shop owner left again, and Sokka breathed a sigh of relief. Food and wine was filched from the kitchen upstairs, and when the last of them finally arrived, they settled over every surface like komodo rhino flies to finally discuss the plan. Sokka stood just close enough to the palace guard rotation list spread out in front of Tolon, trying to catch a glimpse of their inside man’s name while he listened.

The strongest benders were going with Tolon. A few of the men shifted when Tolon mentioned that, and Sokka could pick out the people he’d made note of at the party, the ones who’d hardly seemed bothered by Katara’s waterbending demonstration. Tolon’s man would get them in, and from there they’d make their way to the throne room, ambush the Fire Lord, and kill him. 

The rest would wait here, on top of this powder keg, for the assassination to be done. Hato was obviously disappointed with that, but Sokka was only privately relieved that they weren’t bringing the kid along. 

Splitting up would make arresting them all a bit harder, though. Sokka cast furtive glances at the ones that looked like they were settling in to stay, trying to commit their faces to memory, to recall the names they’d given him in Cranefish Town. They’d need to send someone here immediately after they stopped the attack, before word reached them that the plan had failed and they scattered. 

Sokka did not point out the most glaringly obvious flaw in their plan, which was that Zuko was very unlikely to be _in_ the throne room. Sokka could count on one hand the number of times he’d used it in the last year, mostly because sitting on the throne made him feel like a pompous ass, and the size of the hall and the distance between his audience and the Fire Lord necessitated by the wall of fire burning in front of the throne made it difficult for him to actually hear who he was speaking to on his left side. Zuko much preferred working from his office, or one of the smaller council rooms if he needed more space, and reserved the throne room for formal occasions and honored guests. 

Which meant that Tolon’s contact on the inside of the palace couldn’t possibly be one of his advisors, nor his usual servants—anyone who interacted with Zuko regularly would know where to find him during the day. It narrowed the possibilities down in Sokka’s mind—someone with a fixed post away from the Fire Lord’s day-to-day, or someone with an off-shift like the night watch… Sokka racked his brain for a possible suspect, but no one immediately came to mind. Ming might know someone. He’d have to ask.

There was another flaw to the plan, one obvious enough that any one of them should have pointed it out. The fact that none of them seemed bothered by the oversight told Sokka everything he needed to know. 

They had no exit strategy. They were going to kill the Fire Lord, or die trying. 

It felt _wrong_ to just sit. Zuko was restless in a way he hadn’t been since they’d first defeated his father. Anxiety crawled under his skin, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was missing something important. They didn’t know why Sokka had been targeted, beyond the obvious attempt to hurt Zuko, or where or even who the missing Kyoshi Warrior was. They didn’t know where—where Sokka was. And Zuko had been _worthless_ , he’d done nothing even though they were still out there, and somehow Suki and Katara were acting like that was _okay_ , when he should be finding answers. 

The only lead they had was the fan. Suki hadn’t been able to learn anything from the other Kyoshi Warriors, but the women who were serving in his guard now were also the women who had left Kyoshi Island to help during the war. They’d agreed that one of the other Kyoshi Warriors, or the islanders still living at home, may have further insight, and Zuko trusted their judgment there. With the active members in his guard apparently a dead end, the fan was hardly anything to go on, but Zuko had to try.

The palace archives seemed the best place to start, but even just from the look on the archivist’s face when he’d asked for her help, he could tell it would be a difficult search. Not everything had survived the war, and that inconsistent preservation complicated things. The logs from Zuko’s ship were incomplete. Most of the intelligence they’d gathered from the first three years of his hunt for the Avatar had been destroyed when Zhao hired those pirates to blow up his ship. That included what information they would have had from their stop on Kyoshi Island. 

Zuko honestly had _no_ idea how the archivist managed to acquire the few surviving pieces from that collection—a handful of poorly bound bundles of charred scraps, which were so badly water damaged that the archivist had insisted on sitting beside him to turn the pages with a pair of tweezers. When he had asked her where she’d found them, she’d looked decidedly shifty, and mumbled something vague about the importance of collecting from diverse sources until he’d let her change the subject. Regardless, his ship’s logs weren’t very helpful. His focus had been solely on capturing Aang back then. They had nothing about the Kyoshi Warriors in them. 

He searched the rest of the archive for any mention of the Kyoshi Warriors, collected between the burning of Kyoshi Island and the end of the war. He found a handful of incidents, recorded during the war, as well as a few arrest records, including Suki’s. 

Zuko made a list of all of the names he’d found, from the incident reports and arrest records dated during the war, as well as any potentially relevant documents from after. From those, most of the warriors listed were… currently within the palace. The third woman down on the list, mentioned in a sparsely-detailed confrontation with the commander of a Fire Nation outpost during the war, was standing watch outside the archive door right at that moment. Zuko jotted all of the names down anyway, and sorted out the ones he didn’t recognize. He looked it over and… it really wasn’t much, but maybe one of the names he didn’t recognize would spark something for Suki. All of them had reason to resent the Fire Nation, to resent Zuko specifically, but it was hard to tell from the terse and unemotional reports in the archive. Zuko frowned at the page, double-checked it, and rose from his seat. 

Two more Kyoshi Warriors had joined the one posted outside the archive door, which Zuko assumed meant Suki was taking a break, and this was her way of making sure he didn’t sneak off somewhere before she returned. The warriors nodded politely as he emerged. None of them knew where Suki was when asked. All three trailed after him down the hallway.

He eventually tracked her down to one of the guard’s training rooms, following the sound of muffled thumps, and the distinct sound of splashing water which probably meant Katara was in there with her, too. Zuko stood on the edge of the room for a moment to watch. 

Hayoon must have cornered Katara at some point, because she had changed into Fire Nation style clothes that were more appropriate for the heat, hair twisted up into a braid. She stood barefoot in the middle of one of the sparring rings. Zuko wasn’t sure what water fixture she’d helped herself to, but there was definitely more than a flask’s worth of water splayed around her, hovering ready to intercept Suki’s strikes.

Suki had changed too, bare faced and dressed down from her Kyoshi Warrior uniform. She looked tired, much more so without the mask of makeup and the straight-backed warrior’s poise she wore on duty. The only piece of her uniform she kept now were her fans. Suki attacked with the sort of ferocity that would not have qualified as friendly sparring, had her opponent been anyone other than Katara. As it was, Katara deflected each blow with the same intensity, chest heaving with the effort of it as Suki danced around her. 

Katara’s choice of sparring opponent was not lost on him. Nor was the tension in both of their expressions, and the violence of their carefully controlled movements, as though the outcome of this match was a much more serious thing.

Zuko had bothered them both enough today. He knew how they were—both of them were the sort of people to push their own feelings aside if they thought it would help, whether it be in comforting him or helping to plan their next move. He appreciated it. He did. But it wasn’t fair to them. It would be beyond selfish to interrupt them now, when they were finally getting a chance to blow off some steam. 

Zuko slipped quietly back into the hall. He handed the folded note to the Kyoshi Warrior closest to the door. 

“Will you give this to Suki when they’re finished?” he asked. She nodded, slipped it into her sleeve without looking at it. He stood indecisively for another moment, but—there was really only one other place he wanted to be, right now.

He’d been spending… maybe too much time in the nursery. 

The other two Kyoshi Warriors had followed him half-way there before he’d stopped to dismiss them. They seemed reluctant to go, but Zuko really just—wanted to be left alone, right now, and the palace guards posted on the end of the hall were perfectly capable of hovering without their help.

He was tired. He could hardly bear to look at their room when he’d returned to the palace, and he hadn’t gone back in since. There was still an unsorted mess of scrolls on Sokka’s desk. He had left a book on the nightstand, too, and the spine was slowly acquiring a permanent crease from the way he’d left it propped open. The closet was filled with Sokka’s clothes, because Sokka was the one who liked to shop, the one who would come home with accessories and jackets and boots he didn’t need _just because_ , and so he had taken up most of their storage.

It had never been a problem, having to dig past three of his husband’s haphazardly stored purchases for every one of his own, until Zuko had been standing at the open mouth of their closet and realized just how much of it was his, and how much of it would never be used again. Everything had smelled like him, his soap, his cologne, and Zuko thought that it should have been a comfort, maybe someday he’d wish he’d _let_ it be, but all he could think was that these worthless things were all still here and Sokka was not, and he was never going to get to see Sokka again—

So he’d sealed the closet tightly, and he’d sealed their room tightly, and hours later Hayoon had found him on the couch in the nursery, wearing yesterday’s rumpled robes, frowned at him for half a moment, and then determinedly marched off again. She had returned with what seemed like half his wardrobe slung over her shoulder, and promptly set about making room in Izumi’s closet for it.

The nursery carried its own memories, but they were less immediate, and less painful. Zuko could focus on Izumi and what she needed, and it made it more bearable. Izumi had cried herself to sleep. She’d asked for Sokka, over and over, and Zuko hadn’t wanted to tell her no, but all he could do was hold her and let her cry herself to exhaustion, because she hadn’t wanted him to put her down for bed, she wanted _Sokka_ , and he wasn’t coming. 

There was a knock at the door, and then the soft click of the latch a moment later. The list of people who would simply come in without waiting was only growing shorter, so Zuko wasn’t surprised when he turned to see that Katara had let herself into the nursery. 

She had a tray in one hand, a plain brown teapot he’d never seen in his life balanced on the top with two matching cups. It wasn’t the sort of thing the servants would ever dare to serve to the Fire Lord—most likely, it was one of the pots the cooks used themselves during their breaks—and Zuko wondered how she’d managed to get it past the servants, and especially Hayoon, who seemed determined to make certain that he, and by extension his guest, didn’t have to lift a finger right now. Zuko would be surprised she hadn’t wrestled Katara for the pot at the door, if he was less familiar with Katara’s own personal brand of stubbornness. 

It wasn’t difficult to guess what she wanted. Zuko knew he looked terrible. Katara didn’t look much better, and he knew that her first impulse was to take care of other people, but… she’d done enough. More than enough. It would be good, when Aang got here, for her to have someone to lean on. 

Neither Aang nor Toph had replied to his letters. Normally, that might have worried him, but Zuko knew that they were both probably already on their way here, that a letter sent ahead may not arrive that much earlier than either of them, even from halfway around the world. 

“Suki got your list. I told her to look into it tomorrow, but she’ll probably start later tonight,” Katara said. She raised the tray in her hands. “And I brought tea.”

It really wasn’t that late yet, but that would be if he was sleeping normally. Zuko was beyond tired now, and Izumi was fast asleep in his arms. He’d tried to sleep on the airship. He had spent the whole trip staring at the ceiling instead, gripped by the awful knowledge that Sokka had been down there, somewhere, and Zuko had failed to bring him home. With the lights in the nursery low, and a warm bundle in his arms, he should have been comfortable, but Zuko just couldn’t settle.

“It’ll help you sleep tonight,” she promised quietly, after he’d hesitated a moment too long.

That wasn’t true. There was only one person that could have helped him sleep, and he was gone. A little tea wasn’t going to do anything. The thought of going up to their empty chambers, and going to sleep alone in their bed felt impossible. He was already dealing with nightmares. He was living one. Zuko knew that sleep wouldn’t come easily for a long, long time, no matter where he was or what he did.

Zuko took the cup when she offered it anyway, awkwardly shuffling his arm out from under Izumi, flexing his fingers to coax the life back into them. He could tell the tea was slightly too hot just by touch, probably a bit scorched, old tea shop habits rolling in the back of his mind. Zuko took a polite sip anyway. He thought he did a very good job of keeping his expression neutral. 

“No good?” Katara asked, a little smile tugging the corner of her mouth. So maybe he hadn’t kept such a straight face, after all. 

The tea was—well. It wasn’t Uncle’s, that was… certainly true, but she’d… done her best. He appreciated the gesture, anyway, as much as he knew it wouldn’t help him sleep. 

“It’s fine,” Zuko said. 

“Hm, that bad?” she said, though she didn’t sound the least bit offended by his poor lying. “I guess I can scratch tea shop retirement off my list.”

Zuko hummed. The thought of his uncle twisted uncomfortably in his stomach. He’d tried to start that letter last night, and managed about four words before he couldn’t bear to look at it anymore. It wasn’t like the letters he’d written to his friends. He’d needed Katara to come to help him find out who’d done this, he’d had a reason to write those letters beyond sharing the news. With Uncle it was just to tell him what had happened, and to look for… comfort, maybe, and...

Zuko just—couldn’t, right now.

The longer he waited, the more likely the news was to reach Uncle on its own. And that was… he knew that was selfish. Uncle loved Sokka, and he’ll be devastated to hear what happened to him. Zuko knew that when he wrote him, Uncle would come right away, just as Katara had. But there was something about writing that letter that felt so terrifyingly final, like writing it and sending it out into the world could somehow make it more true. When he wrote that letter he’d have to write to Sokka’s father and grandmother, too, and let the truth of it spread out and take root in the rest of the world and then… and then there would be nowhere left, where Sokka wasn’t gone. He’d swung from hurt to angry to hurt again and he was just so fucking tired, and what he _wanted_ was to go back to his own room, and curl up in his bed with his husband and just sleep, and—he couldn’t. 

Katara brushed a hand down his arm soothingly. The gesture was meant to be comforting, but it just made him more guilty, because Sokka was her _brother_ , but here she was comforting him.

“You look tired,” she said. “And it’s not just… It’s not just the sleep. Zuko, I’m worried about you.”

Zuko _was_ tired physically, but he was mentally exhausted, too. He couldn’t meditate. And he was _trying_. Earlier he’d sat with his eyes closed, with a lit candle settled in front of him, and tried to clear his head. 

But he just—he couldn’t. Every time he tried to settle into it, to clear his mind and still his thoughts, that sick, anxious feeling flooded into the empty spaces. He couldn’t meditate. He couldn’t pretend to be calm. The fire in his chest felt like it was burning him up from the inside, like a house fire raging behind the walls, hollowing him out into some charcoal shell. Clearing his head wasn’t going to change anything. It wouldn’t bring Sokka back, it wouldn’t find who did this, it would do nothing to douse the anger and the regrets threatening to swallow him. 

He’d flicked his hands and called a flame to his palm and it had been a red, violent little thing, with none of the energy or life of the dragon fire. Even using the stupid candle to keep his flame steady wasn’t doing him any good, and Zuko knew he couldn’t keep going on like this, but he was just so _angry_ , and every time he tried shut those thoughts away the candle swelled dangerously with his breath, taunting him with his own lack of self-control. 

He didn’t want to talk about it, though. He was dangerously frustrated with himself as it was, and talking about it meant facing it, which Zuko very much did not want to do. 

“You should rest, too,” Zuko said, because he knew Katara wasn’t having any easier of a time sleeping. “It’s been a long couple days.” 

Katara just looked at him for a long moment, and Zuko was sure that she knew exactly what he was thinking. He hoped, if she took that as the dismissal it was, she wouldn’t hate him for it. She didn’t say anything, just sighed and pushed off her knees as she stood. She put her hand on Zuko’s shoulder, steady and kinder than he deserved. He turned his face down, brushed a thumb over Izumi’s temple, ruffling the peach fuzz there. Izumi made a quiet noise and didn’t wake.

“Try to get some sleep, Zuko,” Katara said quietly. Zuko nodded, but made no move to stand, and Katara stood there for another moment longer, blew out a soft breath, and finally left Zuko to his thoughts.

Anticipation had settled over all of them, once dusk set in. It was time. Sokka expected them to leave, to slip out into the alley and make their way to the palace through the back streets. 

Instead, he watched as they stood, and began shuffling tables and crates against the walls. After a moment, Sokka joined them, not fully certain why. Once they’d cleared the space, Tolon edged around the open floor, quietly contemplating the ground. He stopped against the far wall, paused, and planted his feet. With one sharp thrust, he punched down, and the other men moved as though to cushion the blow. The floor collapsed with a cloud of dust, the sound strangely muffled as the others pulled back against the vibrations, settling the sound so that even Sokka, standing only feet away, could hardly feel the tremor. 

The Fire Lord’s bunker stretched through a labyrinthine spider web of tunnels beneath Caldera City. Sokka hadn’t actually been down here in years. It wasn’t an obvious way inside. It wouldn’t work to just punch through the ground at random. Without a very detailed knowledge of the tunnel’s layout, earthbending through was a lot more likely to land you inside a lava tube than it was to get you safely inside—unless you were Toph, of course, and you could see where you were going. Even if you did manage to get a detailed map of the inside of the tunnels, the passages entering and exiting the bunker beneath the palace were blocked by metal doors, and would leave you trapped outside anyway—again, unless you were Toph. 

Tolon was no Toph. He leapt down into the hole anyway, and landed silent as a spirit in the tunnel below. Amai followed after, and called a flame to her palm to light their way. 

They came out in one of the natural corridors that spindled beneath the city, similar to the one Sokka had chased Azula through, what felt like a lifetime ago. 

Amai led the way, twisting through the dimly lit tunnels with the same confidence she’d led them through the streets. Sokka followed, trying to keep some bearing on which way they’d come from as they wove through the maze of tunnels. Slowly the ground shifted from the uncarved stone of the natural caves, to the smooth carved stone of the labyrinth, until finally the stone beneath their boots gave way to metal walkways. They were silent, apart from the echo of their boots against the metal flooring. 

The door to the bunker was hanging open—not bent, not forced, but carefully unlocked. 

Beyond the bunker door, a short flight of stairs opened into a narrow passage, which snaked around and emptied beyond the guard post that separated the outer courtyards from the inner palace halls. The guard post was empty. Neither Tolon nor Amai gave it a second glance as they passed, not even to check to be certain that there was no one lurking nearby. 

How convenient that it was empty, Sokka thought, considering that the captain of the guard should be there, to verify the business of anyone looking to pass into the inner palace. 

(And he thought, briefly, of how resistant the man had been to the Kyoshi Warriors joining the guard, years ago. Sokka and Zuko had thought it was professional jealousy at the time, and had assured the man that the Kyoshi Warriors and the Palace Guards would be acting as two separate, collaborating entities… He’d seemed unsatisfied with that, too, and Sokka and Suki had privately concluded that the man was simply an asshole, but now he had to wonder…)

The inner palace was quiet. They were nearly on the shift change, now, when the servants were less likely to be wandering the halls with their errands. Sokka followed behind them as though he did not know the palace like the back of his hand. Should he slip away now and find Zuko, or wait until they’d made their way to the throne room? They seemed to know where they were going, but he didn’t want to risk them changing directions on him and getting away, or running into one of the staff—

Amai moved to turn the corner and then quickly darted back. 

“Patrol,” she said. She flexed her fingers, took a steadying breath, and glanced at Tolon. She seemed unbothered, a clear question on her face. Sokka had been hoping it wouldn’t come to this, that they would be able to avoid any of the regular guards that patrolled the palace at least until they reached the throne room. It might be a risk, but no matter how much he wanted to keep his cover, he wasn’t going to let them kill anyone. Even if it meant outing himself. Sokka hazarded a glance around the bend and froze.

There was a Kyoshi Warrior down the hall.

...Not just any Kyoshi Warrior. 

“I’ll handle her,” Sokka said. “You keep going.”

Amai cut him a glance. “I can take her,” she said. 

“I thought we were being subtle,” Sokka said blandly. “Your method is a little… flashier than mine.”

Amai grimaced. Sokka held her gaze, wondering whether that barb about her firebending had been one step too far, wondering whether this would be the moment she chose not to trust him. He glanced over at Tolon, but he was only looking at them with interest, happy to see how the exchange played out. After a moment too long, Amai looked away.

“Fine,” she snapped. She took a step back, toward the others. “You deal with her. We’ll go around.”

He could feel their gazes following him, as he slipped silently into the hall. He should have expected that Amai wouldn’t fully trust him to deal with the guard. Sokka didn’t need to look back, to know she’d leave someone behind to supervise, and make sure the Kyoshi Warrior was taken care of without raising the alarm for the rest of them. He’d have to make it look good. 

Suki had her back to him, facing the other end of the corridor. 

(Actually, Sokka wasn’t really sure why he’d worried about making this look good, because—)

Suki spun before he’d even reached her, as though she’d somehow sensed his silent footfalls, and lashed out at him so violently with her fan that she almost ended it in one stroke. Sokka blocked, clumsily, with his own fan, and her expression went so suddenly, viciously murderous that his breath caught in his throat. 

Suki ripped her katana from her sheath, and Sokka did the same. Their swords clashed, ringing deafeningly in the empty hallway. The last thing he wanted to do was hurt her, or, you know, get stabbed again—he advanced quickly, before she could think, or get a good look at his unfamiliar stance. 

He knew Suki, and he had sparred with her enough times to know that her drawing her katana meant she aimed to draw blood or worse. He didn’t give her the chance. He stuck to the forms he’d learned from Master Piandao, something Suki wouldn’t expect from a Kyoshi Warrior, and let her catch his sword on the downswing. 

His height and sword mastery were, maybe, the only things he actually had an advantage over Suki in, and he used every ounce of that advantage now to force the blade down and out of her hands. It clattered onto the stone beneath them, and Sokka managed to kick it away. Suki barely blinked at her mistake, and in an instant she’d whipped her fan from her belt again. She slashed at his face, forcing him to duck and unbalance before he could follow through. 

She grabbed his sword arm by the wrist, twisted and tried to strike him again with her fan. Sokka was expecting it, and blocked the blow, shoved her arm away. The footsteps down the hall were rapidly receding, but that didn’t mean that they’d all moved on, that someone hadn’t stayed behind to make sure he got the job done. 

He pulled Suki closer and forced his back to the hall, partly blocking her from view. 

“Suki,” Sokka hissed. Her hand flinched on his arm, and her eyes flew wide. In the shadowed corner of the hallway, she’d barely glanced at his face when she rounded on him, more interested in what his hands were doing, her training instantly kicking in. But she looked at him now, with wide-eyed shock as she recognized his voice, “It’s me.”

Suki stared at him for a moment, and he could see her trying to make sense of him, body still on high alert, looking and seeing the Kyoshi Warrior and trying to figure out who—

Her fingers flexed crushingly tight on his wrist, and she made a small, almost wounded sound in her throat. She knew who he was.

“ _How_?” she breathed, voice barely there. 

“I’m going to kill you now, so play along,” he whispered against her ear. 

“You—what?” she asked, more confused than panicked as he swept the katana forward, tilted it just-so to catch the light of the hall—and Sokka could see, in its reflection, the shadow of someone there, watching, just for a moment before he thrust the blade as though to stab her. He stopped short, with the blade pinned between them. Suki flinched, and looked baffled. 

“Now you fall down,” he said. “Haven’t you ever died before?”

“That’s—Sokka that’s _not funny_ ,” she hissed, but her voice was thin and strained, fragile and so unlike her. It cut Sokka like a knife. Suki slumped forward toward his shoulder, and let Sokka lower her to the ground.

“I know,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. I’ll explain everything later, just—there’s no time, right now.”

He cupped the back of her head for the briefest moment as he laid her flat, then crouched over her like he was searching her for weapons. Suki’s gaze flicked quickly down the hall, then back to his face, carefully still.

“They’re leaving,” Suki said, lips barely moving. Sokka hesitated. “The person at the end of the hall.”

Sokka blew out a breath. 

“The people who tried to kill me are here in the palace. They’re here to kill Zuko,” he said quietly, as he pretended to wipe the blade clean on his thigh and slid it back into its sheath. “It’s a long story. Get the rest of the warriors and Katara, then meet us in the throne room. That’s where they’re headed. Just, uh. Play dead until the coast is clear.”

Sokka moved to stand, but he paused when he felt a hand curl around his ankle. She didn’t say anything, just held on. It was difficult to tell if the short, quick breaths were because she was playing dead, or because she was trying to get control of herself.

She squeezed once, and let go. Her eyes were suspiciously shiny when he glanced back at her. Sokka’s chest tightened, apologies and reassurances caught in his throat. He knew what he’d put her through, these last couple days, how much he must have hurt her, but it was painful to see the evidence etched so plainly on her face. He crushed down the impulse to say something more as he turned to walk away. The hallway was a quiet, unforgiving stone, and he wasn’t sure if his voice would carry.


	4. Loose Ends

Sokka left Suki lying in the palace hall. Whoever had been watching them was gone when Sokka passed back the way he’d come. He glanced down both halls, but none of the assassins seemed to have lingered. There was only one obvious path to the throne room from here that didn’t involve the servants' corridors, so Sokka quickened his step. 

If he could catch up to them, he might be able to stall and give Suki more time.

He’d seen the map they were using. It was concerningly accurate, so he cut down the quickest route, expecting that to be the one they’d taken. Sokka glanced down every side hallway regardless, half-expecting someone to be waiting for him around each corner. The last thing he needed was a repeat performance of that first night played in some quiet corner of the Fire Palace. It was that paranoia that kept him from missing it—the trailing foot of the last of their group slipping around the corner at the end of a long hallway. He stopped. 

They’d… taken a wrong turn?

Sokka hurried to follow. This seemed like a strange route to take to the throne room, a little out of the way. It was enough to make Sokka hang back, rather than rushing to catch up to them, so he could watch where they were going. Tolon led them around what would have been the most direct route to the throne room and passed out through a door to one of the inner gardens. Sokka stood tense at the edge of the courtyard to watch the group. 

Under the shadow of one of the trellis overhangs, fire lilies swishing around their ankles, Tolon and Amai conversed with their heads bowed. The other benders they’d brought along lingered at the other side of the garden, just out of sight should anyone be passing by, but clearly giving the two space for their own private discussion.

Sokka was too far away to make out what they were saying, but something must not be right, because they were nearly to the throne room, and every moment they lingered here was another chance for discovery. A slight sense of unease pricked at his mind as he watched them. 

Did they know that he hadn’t killed Suki? Could they be suspecting some sort of ambush? It wouldn’t matter—they were too deep into the palace by now to escape without a confrontation. Tolon said something, and Amai’s face went very blank, as still as a held breath. After what felt like hours, but was truly only seconds, Amai gave him a single solemn nod and then—

—and then Amai moved back over to the other benders, where they stood waiting by the exit. Tolon turned the other way, crossing through the courtyard. Sokka ducked back behind the column as Tolon passed. Amai and her benders disappeared through the doorway like shadows. 

Sokka cursed under his breath as he watched them part ways, but there was no question where he needed to go. 

He followed Tolon.

Where could he possibly be going? If he’d realized that Zuko wouldn’t be in the throne room, surely he wouldn’t have struck out alone to find him. From this hallway, they could reach the armory or the treasury, although both would require some back-tracking on their parts, and... they were assassins, not thieves. Tolon had to know that both would be guarded. 

Sokka couldn’t imagine what he’d want from the armory. Tolon was just one man. He couldn’t carry much out on his own, if he did want to steal weapons, and anyway, the cellar they were using as a home base had seemed plenty stocked to not risk it. There were blueprints in the armory, though, for submarines, for airships, prototypes he was certain Tolon couldn’t even imagine, but what could he possibly use them for? They might be valuable, but they weren’t the sorts of things that a single person could make use of. He didn’t exactly have the backing of the Fire Nation’s treasury to fund construction like they did, and Sokka doubted any other nation would be interested in buying stolen blueprints during peacetime, not when the Fire Nation was perfectly happy to share with them. 

The treasury might be worth it, but again, he was just one person, how much could he possibly carry with him? And that seemed… unlike him, to have planned to kill the Fire Lord with no exit strategy, and then to detour to rob them like a common thief. 

Could he be meeting another collaborator? 

The archives were in this direction. There may be useful information there, but… most of those documents were publicly available anyway, if they were requested through the proper channels. Sokka had to admit that the head archivist had never seemed happy to see him, but she was also a nearly seventy year old woman who never seemed happy to see anyone… Honestly, anyone _except_ Zuko, who she had a soft spot for, and anyway Sokka couldn’t imagine someone who cared so much about preserving every single one of their letters for posterity, no matter how trivial, could possibly want to kill them.

She did have a handful of staff, though…

Tolon paused at the junction of the hallway, and Sokka waited to see if he would turn left, to the armory, or keep on straight to the archives. Tolon glanced to the left, and then...

No. No, he was turning... right?

But there was nothing down there for him, just guest rooms and lounges and the empty council chambers beyond those, certainly no weapons or intelligence that might feed a rebellion, and...

Oh.

 _Certain circumstances have changed_ , he’d said—

Sokka sprinted to the corner. 

—and they’d moved their plan to the palace, but only recently, only in the last year, _spirits_ , why hadn’t he seen it sooner— 

There was no guard at the door, but there should have been, _where the fuck was the guard_?

—but he hadn’t even considered, because what kind of _monster_ —

Sokka’s heart rose in his throat when he came around the corner and saw the nursery door there, standing open, creaking slightly as Tolon crept through to the antechamber. 

Sokka slammed through the door, seizing Tolon by the collar of his shirt and spinning him around. Tolon flinched, already shifting his stance before he fully recognized Sokka. Surprise, first, and then a faint amusement crossed over his face. Tolon’s gaze slid over him, and Sokka was hyper aware of how his chest was heaving, not just from running to catch him, knuckles pale where they were still twisted in Tolon’s tunic. His smile took a dangerous edge, probing Sokka’s anger like a loose tooth. 

“Come for another kill, Shikyo?” Tolon asked, sounding amused, sounding almost _pleased to see him_. “I think this one might be a little too easy for you, but—”

“What the _fuck_ do you think you’re doing?” Sokka hissed. Tolon still had his hand against the open doorway, airing the empty antechamber. Where were the guards? Where was the _nurse_? Was she inside the nursery with Izumi, or had Tolon’s contact done more than open the gate for them? The floors were stone, more fireproof, safer for a child who might someday be a firebender. Tolon could trap Sokka outside if he wanted to, if he thought he needed to, and that fear seized Sokka's chest. He edged slowly forward, and Tolon backed up, allowing him more fully into the room. 

“I’m tying up loose ends,” Tolon said. Sokka recoiled, flushed with disgust and anger at how casually he admitted it. Tolon made a face. 

“Oh, is this where you draw the line?" Tolon asked, infuriatingly calm. “I know it’s distasteful, but it needs to be done. As I said, for as long as this family clings to power—”

Sokka bit back a snarl and shook him, stopping the man’s words before he could finish that awful thought. 

“She’s a _baby_ ,” Sokka said.

“And someday she’ll be Fire Lord,” Tolon said. “Best not let it get that far.”

Tolon stared at him, the resolve clear in his eyes. He was going to kill their daughter, a _baby_ , too young to even understand, let alone deserve the consequences of her fathers’ actions, as though a child her age had any part in this at all. Sokka’s fist tightened on the man’s collar. He saw the edge of uncertainty creep into his expression, as he waited to see whether Sokka would come around to the idea. Suddenly Sokka didn’t care, eathbender or not, unknown contacts or not, he was going to kill Tolon with his stolen sword, right fucking here on the rug in the nursery antechamber—

Tolon was watching him, wary, startled by his change in mood, or maybe he really was unable to understand why this murder was so much worse than trying to kill Sokka days ago.

But then his eyes widened, just slightly, and cut away, drawn by the soft click that echoed through the chamber. 

Behind Tolon, the door to the nursery opened. 

Izumi had settled in her crib almost an hour ago. Zuko sat at the desk with the light of the lamp turned as low as he could manage. He hadn’t gotten a single piece of work done since the moment that servant had come into his office days ago. He knew with absolute certainty that no matter how much he tried to focus, he wouldn’t be able to, and all the while the unfinished work piled higher. His advisors were, for now, managing themselves. Zuko knew it was a temporary fix. The council he’d gathered for himself over the last few years was reliable, but a deep and distrustful part of him knew that these sorts of self-absorbed distractions were exactly the kind of thing that cunning men would take advantage of, if Zuko let them.

His father had waited until Lu Ten died to make his move, had taken advantage of Uncle’s distraction in his grief to seize the throne for himself, and that had been beyond disastrous. Zuko knew he was barely holding it together. As much as he cloistered himself away in his daughter’s room, the rest of his advisors must know, too, and that was a dangerous thing in an already unstable time.

At some point, Zuko had started to forget what it was like before the war ended, to be constantly preparing for the worst case scenario. Without even realizing it, he’d stopped bracing himself for the fall every time something went right. He’d stopped expecting the bad to stay that way. He’d gotten soft. 

(And now Sokka was dead).

Zuko had opened and closed the same scroll eight times since he’d finally laid Izumi down in her crib. He shoved it away again. He just couldn’t do it, couldn’t focus on something that felt so trivial. The awful reality of it—that this was it, it would always be this way, and it was never going to get better—was staring him hard in the face and he just… couldn’t. 

And then there was the funeral. 

They didn’t even have a body to bury. Zuko was a coward, so of course he still hadn’t written to his uncle. Katara had taken pity on him and offered to write to their father for him tomorrow, and the guilt of not being the one to do it had stuck in his throat for hours after he’d agreed. 

He couldn’t even write one letter, and they were going to expect him to make decisions for the memorial here in the Fire Nation, for the final vigil. Then he would have to travel to the Water Tribe—it was the least he owed Sokka, to make sure that he and Izumi were there with their family during their own memorial. Zuko didn’t even want to think about what a nightmare that conversation would be, the Fire Lord and his heir both leaving the Fire Nation so soon after an assassination in the royal family, and the sort of planning he’d need to do to make sure that no one took advantage of his absence...

And somehow in all of this, they needed to keep looking, for Sokka and for the person responsible. Suki had promised him he didn’t need to worry, that she would handle it. And it wasn’t that he didn’t trust her to—he just couldn’t bear to focus on anything else.

Zuko sighed and moved to rise from his desk, but before he could he heard—he swore he heard a creak, and he paused. After a moment, just long enough to think maybe he’d imagined it, there was a thump in the hall, the sound of it carrying muffled through the antechamber and past the closed door of the nursery. Zuko’s head snapped up at the noise, fingers flexed against the desk as he paused to listen. 

He could hear voices. For half a moment he wondered if it could be Katara or Suki, but the register was too deep. Suspicion curled in his chest at the sound, not a normal conversation, the anger in that voice bleeding through the door even if the words were dampened through the heavy wood. 

The knot in Zuko’s chest tightened. He thought, with the hour, it could be one of his advisors coming to him with something urgent before the workday ended. It could be. But somehow, he knew it wasn’t, bone deep and with the same urgency as was behind that hushed argument, he _knew_ it wasn’t. Zuko threw open the door to the nursery. 

There was a man in the antechamber, one of the Kyoshi Warriors stopping him with a fist curled around his collar. At the sound of the door the man whirled and fixed Zuko with a briefly startled look. His gaze flicked between his scar and his crown, and his expression hardened.

“What is this?” Zuko asked. 

He edged defensively in front of the open door, and kept a wary eye on the man. How had he gotten in here? And to only be caught by a Kyoshi Warrior when he was already inside the threshold was unacceptable, he _never_ should have made it this far. There should have been guards in the hall to stop him sooner. Zuko grit his teeth and felt the heat pressing into his fist as the man eyed him and—smiled.

“My apologies for the intrusion, _my Lord_ ,” the man said, voice dripping with a level of disdain that made Zuko tense even further. “It seems we miscalculated. We’d expected you in the throne room.”

Zuko sized the man up, the way he stood his ground and shifted his feet only just barely further apart, like he was trying to keep Zuko from noticing. He was a bender, definitely, but not—not a firebender, by the look of him. Somehow he’d managed to get inside the palace and past the guards and into the nursery without anyone stopping him until he was literally _at the door_ — 

And then the man’s words caught up to him, and Zuko reconsidered what he’d said, _We’d_ expected you in the throne room. 

We, as in—?

Zuko’s eyes flashed to the green and gold uniform of the Kyoshi Warrior frozen beside him. Zuko saw them—the faintly blood-stained robe, the face paint, the fan, _only one fan_ clenched in one fist, and—

Zuko saw the Kyoshi Warrior who had killed his husband, and then he saw nothing but flames.

Zuko’s gaze landed on him, and for a half-second Sokka thought he’d recognized him. The lights in the room surged brighter, as the fire in every wall sconce swelled. Sokka started to smile, and then—

Zuko snarled, and sparks scattered between his teeth. A sheet of flame erupted from both of Zuko’s fists, and Sokka flinched at the sheer heat of it. 

Zuko—no, Zuko definitely didn’t recognize him, the look in his eye was murderous, it was _gut wrenching_. He slammed Izumi’s door behind him, rattling the frame, and in the same motion Zuko thrust forward with both hands. Sokka swore and flicked the retractable shield from his bracer, brought it up, turned away, for all the good it would do him as the flames swept from Zuko’s arms in a roaring wave and—

A column of stone erupted from the ground with a deafening crack, and then the fire swallowed them. Sokka shielded his face from the flames, a solid, furious red. He could pick out none of the little flecks of dragon fire that had colored Zuko’s flame since he’d gone to see the Sun Warriors, and even with the stone wall and his shield it was so hot that Sokka held his breath to keep from burning his lungs. 

The flames swept away. Sokka gasped in relief and glanced aside. Tolon had slammed both hands into the ground, buried to the knuckles in the floor with the force of it. He ripped them out, scattering shards of stone, gritting his teeth. 

Sokka almost laughed, a little frantic, but then another blast of flame crashed into the rock beside him, and he had to shrink back and brace himself and _keep it together_ , because—because he’d come to save Zuko from Tolon and, somehow, Tolon was saving him from _Zuko_. 

“I suppose it’s good you’ve come along after all,” Tolon said, a little breathlessly. “We can round out the pair. I’ll deal with the princess after, if you haven’t got the stomach for it.”

Tolon slammed both palms on the stone wall and sent it careening across the room in two broken pieces. Zuko rolled away from it, practically ignored it as it collided with the back wall and shattered. He looked furious, keeping his back to Izumi’s room, pressing toward them with a desperate rage. 

Zuko thrust another spear of fire forward, and Sokka swept it aside with his fan. He could feel the metal heat in his hand, just from that one blow. Sokka had never seen Zuko so furious, even when he’d still been hunting them, convinced Aang was his only chance at redemption. Zuko’s face twisted as he threw a blistering streak of flame at Sokka, smoothly dodging errant rock without returning a single attack Tolon’s way, so fast that Sokka could hardly catch his breath. Even braced against the force of it, even angling his shield to deflect the next strike to the side, Sokka slid back several inches under the weight of each blow. Sokka barely swept the next bolt aside with his fan and ducked under another. Zuko was ignoring Tolon to come at Sokka with a single-minded focus that was going to get him killed— 

_If he doesn’t kill me first_ , Sokka thought, a little hysterically. Zuko wasn’t even looking at him beyond the disguise. He was just attacking wildly, because if he took a moment to calm down and breathe, he might notice— 

“Seems the Fire Lord has learned who killed his beloved husband,” Tolon taunted, loud enough for Zuko to hear.

Tolon’s lips took on a viscous curl at the flinch that jab earned. The look on Zuko’s face, so raw and angry and _broken_ , was enough to stop Sokka’s heart. Tolon was taunting him, was trying to make him lose control, sinking the knife in and twisting with the hope that it would give him an edge in the fight. He could see the way Zuko was ignoring him, and he was counting on it, hoping that he’d slip up and drop his guard long enough for a cheap shot in his distraction.

Flames were lapping up the walls to either side of them, the tapestries and the furniture cracking under the blaze, burning up to ash. The heat of it pricked Sokka’s skin. He could feel the sweat on his nape, the fine soot sticking in his throat. Thick smoke hung in the air, burning Sokka’s lungs, and he could see the way the fire surged with Zuko’s breathing, harsh and bright, as he thrust forward and forced them both to dodge back.

Zuko looked angry, but more than anything he looked _devastated_.

Sokka stopped in his tracks, he couldn’t help it, because that look on Zuko’s face was too much to bear, he never wanted Zuko to look like that, not because of him—

And Tolon?

Tolon still thought Sokka was on his side. 

Tolon twisted his leading foot, shifted, swung his back foot around to stomp the ground, as though to launch another stone javelin at Zuko. Sokka ignored the fire, swept forward with his fan, but not toward Zuko, and caught Tolon’s heel. 

_The best way to stop an earthbender is to break their root_ , Toph always said when they would spar. Sokka had never in his spirits damned life broken Toph’s root, but Tolon’s was easy enough. 

Sokka swept him off his feet, used his own weight against him to bring him crashing down on his elbows. He had one moment for Tolon to turn his furious, betrayed gaze on him. 

“You _bastard_ —” Tolon spat, and Sokka couldn’t help how absolutely fucking smug he looked as he braced himself and brought up his shield, because—

Zuko didn’t hesitate. He scythed out a streak of flame, and it struck Tolon, and Sokka’s shield, full force. 

Sokka’s back slammed against the far wall. His vision flashed painfully white as the impact jarred his wounded side. He’d known it was coming, and braced for it, but still his lungs seized as the wind was knocked out of him. Somehow, miraculously, he landed heavily on his feet, as Tolon slumped against the wall, unconscious. 

He didn’t have time to catch his breath. Even his robes, designed to bear the worst of any fight, were smoldering faintly. He’d barely forced the burning air into his lungs again in time to speak.

“Wait—” Sokka croaked, and the smoke spurred him to coughing. More flames lashed toward him, and he was forced to duck behind a lopsided spear of stone left over from one of Tolon’s attacks. He waited one breath for the fire to wash over his head. 

Sokka tried to step out, fan half-raised to defend against another attack. “Zu—”

Zuko tackled him, slammed both shoulders into the ground, and the pain in his side left him breathless as his knee slammed into Sokka’s hip. Zuko was kneeling over him, pinning him down, one smoking fist raised. Zuko’s right hand was a brand against his shoulder, five points of agony, and Sokka clenched his teeth against the burn. Zuko wasn’t seeing him, he was seeing the Kyoshi Warrior but he wasn’t seeing _him_. He dropped his fan. He grasped Zuko’s wrist desperately and _forced_ the air into his lungs.

“Zuko, look at me!” Sokka shouted. 

The hand at his neck tightened to the point of choking for one second, then two... Sokka met his furious gaze for a drawn moment, breath shuddering in his chest as Zuko stared and stared. He inhaled sharply, and the flames lapping up the walls surged violently. Sokka watched the shock on Zuko’s face melt into something closer to heartbreak, and then Zuko’s chest heaved, unsteady, and the flames clawing up the walls all shuddered and snuffed out at once, so quickly that an ash-dusted breeze swept across the floor. 

“You...” Zuko started, stopped. The hand on his shoulder slipped down, and Sokka gasped in relief. He dropped his other hand to Sokka’s shirt, clutching the fabric of his robe above the armor “...Sokka?”

“I’m sorry,” Sokka said wretchedly, and the look on Zuko’s face would be seared into his memory for the rest of his life, it was _awful_ , disbelieving and anguished and so desperately hopeful, all at once. “I’m so sorry.”

Zuko collapsed over him. He kissed him desperately. Zuko’s mouth was searingly hot, almost too much, and Sokka could taste ash on his tongue. He pulled back, buried his face in Sokka’s neck, clutching him white-knuckled as though Sokka might disappear if Zuko let go. A choked sob escaped him, and Sokka wrapped his arms around Zuko’s shoulders and tried to hold him together.

“You were—” Zuko's voice broke. His brittle tone chafed at the lonely part of him that had been missing Zuko for days, and that had been quietly aching in the knowledge that he was alive, and Zuko was mourning him anyway. Zuko sounded desperate when he tried again, “ _How_ are you—?”

“One of them followed me to the ferry. She tried to kill me,” Sokka said into Zuko’s hair, soothing his hands down his shoulders as he tensed in his lap. “There were more of them coming. I didn’t know what else to do, so I just… stole her armor and pretended to be the assassin, and they believed me. I wanted to tell you, but they were watching me, and… I knew they were planning something. I didn’t want them to suspect—I mean, I couldn’t just _let them_.”

Sokka turned his head, pressed a kiss to Zuko’s temple. “They were planning to kill you,” he said simply. “I couldn’t let them.”

Zuko was quiet for a long time, just leaning on him, drawing uneven breaths with his damp cheek pressed against Sokka’s, with his fingers threaded through Sokka’s hair and curled in the fabric of his robe, like he couldn’t bear to separate for even a moment.

“I hurt you,” Zuko whispered against his ear, breathless and shaking, and Sokka hugged him tighter. 

“I hurt you worse,” Sokka said. 

Zuko shook his head immediately, touched his fingers to Sokka’s neck, just above the burn. 

“Not like—” 

“Stop right there. Don’t even think about it,” Sokka said, pushing him back so he could look him in the eye. He could hardly even feel the stinging burns on his neck, he didn’t care about the pulsing throb in his side, he didn’t _care_. He was here, and Zuko was here, and they were both alive. Nothing else mattered. “It’s not your fault. You didn’t know it was me. I didn’t _tell you_ , I’m so sorry. I wanted to tell you.”

There was a streak of makeup from Zuko’s lips to his cheek, from kissing him, from pressing his face to Sokka’s neck. Sokka swiped at it with his thumb, wiping it partly away, and Zuko shivered. 

Faintly from the other room, Izumi began to cry. He and Zuko both turned toward the sound. Some part of Zuko’s desperation seemed to crumble, collapsing in on itself into a quiet, fragile thing.

“She missed you,” Zuko murmured, voice rough and unsteady. “I missed you. Please, just. Don’t leave. Never again.”

Sokka couldn’t promise _never_ , and they both knew it, but the look on Zuko’s face made him want to anyway. 

“I’m here now,” Sokka said, hands framing either side of his husband’s face. Zuko was looking at him like he couldn’t stand to take his eyes off him for even a moment, like he was—was everything, like if the whole world was empty and Sokka was all there was, that would be enough. “I’m not going anywhere, okay? I’m staying right here.”

Zuko leaned in to kiss him again, mouth hot but surprisingly chaste, his fingers curling around Sokka’s shoulders. He pulled back again only slightly. 

“I should...” he said quietly, their lips still near brushing, and Sokka nodded. Izumi was still crying in the other room. She didn’t sound distressed, more an attention seeking sort of cry. Sokka would have been more shocked if the noise _hadn’t_ woken her. Reluctantly, Zuko leaned back on Sokka’s thighs. He scrubbed a hand over his face, and then rose. The charred remains of the carpet crunched softly under his feet. 

Zuko left the door ajar. After a moment, the crying stopped, and Sokka could hear quiet murmuring from the other room. The soft sound settled warmly in his chest, and he leaned back on his elbows for a moment and closed his eyes and just breathed with the weight of the last few days. The door creaked again, and Sokka sat up. 

Izumi was sniffling faintly, with her cheek resting on Zuko’s shoulder. She saw him, or more accurately saw the Kyoshi Warrior’s garb, and turned her face shyly against Zuko’s neck. Zuko huffed fondly. 

“Did we wake you, sweetheart?” Sokka asked. The moment she heard his voice she sat bolt upright, tiny hands pushing away from Zuko so quickly he had to lean over to keep her from falling. 

“Daddy!” she shrieked, all shyness gone, with the emotions and the shock of seeing him mixing up on her face. A moment passed where she just looked at him, like she couldn’t quite decide how to feel. Then she started crying again, overwhelmed, and Sokka’s heart felt too big for his chest as she reached for him before he even had a chance to stand up. Zuko lowered her down into his arms so she could bury her face in his neck. 

Sokka made quiet, soothing noises, running a hand over her back, and then glanced up at Zuko. The look on his face was so soft and desperately relieved that it almost broke him. Sokka had to swallow down the lump of shame rising in his throat, for putting them through this at all. He tipped his cheek against Izumi’s head, just for a moment, and then leaned forward to stand.

Maybe it was because Izumi was getting big, or maybe he was just exhausted, but it took an immense effort to get his feet under him, with Izumi still clinging fiercely to his neck. Sokka swayed slightly when he pushed himself to his feet, and Zuko’s hand flew to his arm. Zuko studied him for half a second before a nervous tension edged into his expression. 

“You’re hurt,” Zuko said, not a question. 

“A little bit,” Sokka admitted, because he didn’t want to lie to him. Zuko’s hand tightened on his bicep, as though Sokka was going to suddenly keel over now that he’d said it out loud. The drawn expression on Zuko’s face might actually kill him, so Sokka quickly added, “It wasn’t you, just so you know. It’s from the other night on the dock, I… oh, stop making that face, I was barely even stabbed.”

That had, maybe, not been the best way to phrase it, because Zuko went very rigid then, and hooked both hands under Sokka’s elbows.

“You were— _why didn’t you say anything_?” Zuko half-shouted, and tried to push him down to sitting again. Sokka rolled his eyes. “Was all of that blood _actually yours_?”

“Well,” Sokka said. “Not _all_ of it…”

“I’m getting your sister,” Zuko said firmly. 

“Zuko, it’s fine, okay? _I’m_ fine. Breathe,” Sokka said, brushing a hand over Zuko’s cheek. “Anyway she’s probably a little busy in the throne room.”

“She…” That made Zuko pause. “Why would she be in the throne room?”

“Because—well, I ran into Suki while we were breaking into the palace. Long story,” he said, before Zuko could get into it. 

The rest of the assassins, led by Amai, were expecting to find Zuko there. They’d chosen to come after the sun had set, when firebenders were naturally weaker, to make Zuko an easier target for their earthbenders… but they weren’t up against a firebender. It wasn’t a full moon tonight, but only barely past, and between Suki and the Kyoshi Warriors and Katara’s waterbending… 

Sokka wasn’t feeling particularly rushed. He shrugged half-heartedly and nodded toward the door. “Should we go check on them?”

Even in the hallway, the temperature approaching the throne room was considerably colder than the rest of the palace. They caught Suki at the corner, on her way to look for him after he’d failed to arrive with the rest of the assassins. She barely batted an eye when he asked her to collect the unconscious man from the nursery, beyond making a few more tearful faces at him—it was hardly the most startling thing he’d asked of her today. The Kyoshi Warriors were moving several of the assassins into the hall when they reached the throne room. Most of the assassins were unconscious. One was not. 

Amai took one look at him, Zuko at his elbow, baby on his hip, and lunged at him so violently that it took two of the warriors on either side of her to hold her back. Zuko flinched forward, too, but Sokka stopped him with a light touch on his arm. 

“You fucking _traitor_ ,” she spat. 

“Traitor?” Sokka said. He leaned into his husband’s side, just slightly, and Zuko’s hand slid around Sokka’s waist absently. Amai’s eyes widened, and her gaze flew to his face as though seeing him for the first time. Sokka was so tired, he could hardly summon a smirk, “I was never even on your side.”

Without another word, he pushed past her into the throne room. It was clear why the hallway was so cold. Jagged spires of ice raked across the room, and several of the assassins were still unconscious and half-frozen, waiting to be freed. 

Katara stared at him in the doorway, not quite surprised but almost disbelieving, as though no matter what Suki had told her, she couldn’t bear to hope until the moment they locked eyes. Katara bit her lip and sucked in a breath, like a wave had just crested over her head, like she was tasting air for the first time.

Sokka rocked back with Katara’s weight as she flung herself at him, and she clutched him so desperately that his chest felt tight. Izumi squirmed a little where she was pinned between them, but she otherwise didn’t complain. Sokka wrapped his free arm around his sister’s back and felt the slight tremor in her shoulders. 

“Hey,” Sokka said softly. “I’m okay.” 

Suddenly the tremor in her shoulders shook into something much more unsteady. It pulled an awful desperate sound from her, and her breath hitched as she began to cry. 

“Oh, no, don’t do that,” Sokka said. Katara mumbled something, he was pretty sure, but he couldn’t quite make out her meaning with her face buried in his neck. He just shushed her and smoothed his fingers over her hair, propped his chin on top of her head, and hugged her. Izumi was making sad little sounds at her, patting Katara on the back with one tiny hand.

With her face pressed against his shoulder, she turned her head just slightly and made a small sound in her throat. Her fingers brushed the edge of the burn on his neck. Sokka quickly shrugged her off. Zuko was—hovering. Trying to not intrude, but obviously wanting to. He reached out a hand toward Zuko, waving him over, until he was close enough to twine their fingers together. His hand was warm and surprisingly steady as he held on.

“I’m okay,” Sokka repeated, voice shaking slightly with exhaustion. He could feel his own body starting to believe it that time, the energy ebbing out of him, and he felt suddenly like he was as much being held up by his own power as he was by Katara and Zuko. 

The throne room was a mess. Their boots splashed faintly beneath them as they settled into one another. Katara was still shaking slightly, and the collar of Sokka’s robe was growing damp under her cheek. He could hardly blame her. Sokka couldn’t bear to think about how he would have felt if it was Katara who had been—no, Sokka couldn’t even finish the thought, throat tightening. Of course he understood. That she’d managed to keep the damage so contained could only be chalked up to Suki warning her in time. Sokka glanced around the throne room, at the violent spears of ice climbing up the walls, and—he took in the sheer amount of water that would take, and how the volume very much would not fit inside her flask. 

Sokka huffed a laugh against Katara’s hair, and the sound of it seemed to shake something loose in her. “Did you empty our turtleduck pond?”

Katara drew a shaky breath, scrubbed her cheek against his robe. She paused for a suspiciously long time before responding, “...I’ll put it back.” 

Sokka snorted. He felt Zuko rest a hand on his back, and he leaned into it, just a little. He was suddenly very tired, and for the first time in days he didn’t have to worry about someone trying to kill him—

“Sokka’s hurt,” Zuko said, like a traitor. Katara’s arms tightened reflexively, and Sokka couldn’t quite suppress a wince.

—no one trying to kill him other than Katara, maybe, when she saw how he’d been ignoring the wound on his side for days—

She leaned back to look at him, red-eyed, face blotchy, but looking a bit more herself with a task at hand. 

“Okay,” she said, more to center herself than for Sokka’s benefit, as the first little sense of normal began to creep back into the room. “Okay. Let me have a look.”

Katara and Zuko’s twin flinches at the urgent knock on the door to their chambers might have been a little amusing, if he hadn’t been dreading the earnest servant who came to inform them that the Avatar and his companion had arrived. Zuko might have sent the letter, but he clearly had no intention of helping Sokka explain. 

Then again, if having to be the bearer of good news—and many, many apologies—was his only punishment for what he’d put his friends through, Sokka knew he was getting off easy.

Sokka had gone sheepishly out to meet them, explanations and apologies already lining up on his tongue, and then he’d immediately sunk up to his knees into the earth of the courtyard. For a single moment Sokka flashed back to Zuko’s face when he hadn’t recognized him in the nursery, and Sokka very briefly feared that Toph might kill him for real this time. Instead she’d dug in her heels and literally dragged him over for a hug. 

…it was still pretty painful, as far as hugs went. She clutched at him crushingly tight, with his arms pinned by his sides as though she was trying to squeeze the life out of him, her forehead firmly planted against the top of his head with him half-sunk in the ground. 

“Mercy, Toph, mercy!” Sokka whined. “I was stabbed _literal days ago_ , you know! It’s not like I _planned_ for any of this.” She didn’t let go of him, but she did stomp her heel and let him free, which he considered an improvement. 

“Katara healed you?” Toph asked, and grimaced slightly at the way her own voice wobbled. She barely waited for him to nod before she punched his shoulder so hard that he stumbled back a step.

“Sokka,” Aang said, in a watery tone that was making Sokka guilty all over again. He had Bumi on one hip, even if he was getting a little big to be carried around. Aang’s hug was a lot more gentle. “What happened? Zuko said—”

“I’m sorry. It’s my fault, not Zuko’s,” Sokka interrupted. He could only imagine, from the way Zuko and Katara and Suki had been looking at him, what his friends had gone through without being able to hear the details in person. “Well, it’s definitely more the assassin’s fault, actually. Let’s go inside, and I’ll explain, and uh...” 

Sokka paused. Bumi was staring at him _very_ intently. “Hey buddy, you okay?”

Bumi leaned off Aang’s hip, reached out extremely hesitantly, and poked him. He paused, as though waiting for something to happen, and then after a long moment he looked… disappointed.

Sokka was holding his nephew in his lap because he loved him, and for absolutely no other reason. It was unrelated that Bumi was a nice deterrent for Toph, who wouldn’t stop punching him and making uncharacteristically weepy faces and punching him more. Although, considering Bumi was an excitable toddler who couldn't sit still, Sokka was still feeling a little beat up on. 

It had taken them the better part of an hour to convince Bumi that Sokka was not, in fact, a spirit. Aang had done slightly too good of a job explaining the concept of mortality to him on the trip over, and then some of the details of the Spirit World when Bumi had asked, which had apparently naturally slotted into place in the toddler’s mind when he’d seen his supposedly-deceased uncle up and about. 

( _“Why, Aang?”_

 _“He could tell I was sad! I had to explain! And I wasn’t going to lie to him,” Aang said defensively._ )

Sokka had forced everyone to come back to their chambers, before they’d made an even bigger spectacle of themselves than they already were, between the not-dead-after-all prince, the weepy Avatar, and the world’s greatest earthbender, determined to make the guards sweat with the number of times she’d assaulted their prince right in front of them, and the uncertainty of whether or not they should do something about it. They’d settled in just in time for Suki to return from the city’s worst noodle shop, laden down with several bags of delicious, traitorous noodles, which she happily went about distributing to the room. Sokka offered a bite of his to Bumi before digging in to his own bowl.

“They weren't expecting us,” Suki said. “We put the collaborators in the dungeons with the ones we captured in the palace, but the guard that Sokka thinks was working with them is in the wind.”

Toph had been very insulted to learn how the assassins had gotten in—nevermind that a weak point only accessible to a team of coordinated earthbending assailants, working with an inside man, was hardly a glaring hole in their security. She’d vehemently declared that she would _take care of it_ , and frankly, as long as she didn’t touch off the volcano while she was remodeling, Sokka wasn’t going to dissuade her from making the palace more secure.

“Sokka is going to have to tell us if anyone else is missing,” Suki added. 

“Which I could have already done, if you’d let me go with you,” Sokka said. 

No one had let him do _anything_ since the fight, even as Suki and the Kyoshi Warriors were rounding up the failed assassins, or as they were tracking down their collaborators before they could scatter into the city. He’d complained exactly once that he was _fine_ and perfectly capable of helping—

—and Katara and Zuko had both sent him such crushing twin looks of distress and anxiety that he’d resigned himself to sitting in their bedroom with Katara and Izumi while Zuko and Suki were off dealing with the aftermath.

Zuko was giving him a repeat performance of that distressed look right now, so rather than pressing the point, Sokka just sighed and slid over on the bed, so there was enough space for Zuko to sit down to his left. 

Izumi was being very well-behaved in Aang’s arms, considering it was _way_ past her bedtime, alternating between trying to chew on Aang’s glider—which was gross, and not for babies—and a toy they’d found to entertain her. Suki had helped Sokka move her crib into their bedroom (or more accurately, she’d done it for him, because again, they wouldn’t let him do _anything_ ). Boundaries be damned, Izumi wasn’t leaving his sight until she was thirty-five years old. 

So Aang was entertaining Izumi, and Sokka was using Bumi as a shield, or—was _spending time with his nephew _, and all the while Katara poked and prodded at his injuries and was generally making Sokka feel a bit like he was being punished for getting stabbed, which wasn’t very fair.__

__Zuko brushed his fingers over Sokka’s collar and very gently pulled it back. The burn was freshly healed, only the slightest bit darker than the skin around it. He’d made Katara heal the burn on his neck first, partly because the guilty looks Zuko kept shooting him would kill him long before the wound on his side ever could, and partly because he wanted to put off the nagging he’d gotten over the stab wound for as long as possible._ _

__“I asked the girls about the kid you mentioned, too,” Suki said, sounding skeptical. “They said they caught him with the rest of them.”_ _

__“Good. I want to talk to him,” Sokka said, through a mouthful of noodles._ _

__“Sokka, they tried to kill you,” Suki pointed out._ _

__“His _brother_ tried to kill me,” Sokka said. “If I was going to write off every person who’s family tried to kill me, I’d have to seriously rethink my life choices.” He leaned into Zuko’s shoulder, as though to make his point. _ _

__He barely had to sway sideways to touch him—Zuko had been extremely clingy for the past few days, and everyone was being very nice about only teasing him about it very, very often._ _

__“Besides,” he said. “He’s only twelve. What he needs is an understanding, tea-loving uncle, not a prison cell.”_ _

__He stretched, wincing slightly, and set his noodles on the nightstand. Katara had already healed his side as well as she could, but the muscles around where the wound had been were stiff and sore, and the healing had left him with a bone-deep tiredness that he was trying very valiantly not to show. Izumi loudly interjected with a string of syllables that were definitely not words, and everyone turned to look at her, which only made her smile and chatter louder._ _

__Sokka brushed his fingers over his neck absently as he surveyed the room, a fond smile tugging his lips. It had been a long time since they were all together. It was… nice, even if the circumstances that had brought them here were less than ideal. Sokka had missed this, and he was just slightly, maybe selfishly pleased that they all seemed to be in no rush to leave, now that they were all together again._ _

__Zuko made a soft sound beside him, and he glanced over just in time to see Zuko’s gaze tracing the line of Sokka’s fingers on his throat. He shifted slightly closer as Sokka pulled his hand back from his neck._ _

__“Here,” Zuko said. He reached into his pocket, and pulled out—_ _

__Oh._ _

__Zuko held out Sokka’s betrothal necklace. It was a lot less bloody than Sokka remembered it, and how Zuko had found the time to replace the band was beyond him. Sokka picked it up to rub his thumb over the pendant. When he’d been forced to hand it over, he hadn’t been certain that he would ever see it again. Sokka was a little surprised at how just the sight of it made a lump rise in his throat._ _

__“Would you—?” he asked, pressing Zuko’s fingers closed around the pendant. Zuko nodded, and shifted around to tie it on for him, fingers warm against the nape of his neck as he smoothed out the fabric of the band. Sokka reached back and trapped his husband’s fingers against his neck, then pulled his hand around to loop their fingers together. He pressed a dry kiss to Zuko’s knuckles and then settled their hands between their knees._ _

__There was still a lot to do, cleaning up the aftermath, catching the traitors, and smoothing over the swirling rumors of his demise. He knew there were more of them out there, assassins, collaborators that had escaped their notice, dissidents who wished them harm, but sitting in their chambers, surrounded by some of the world’s strongest benders and warriors, together and safe for the first time in days, he was more than ready to face them. Sokka leaned into his husband’s shoulder, and his still-beating heart skipped as his husband leaned back._ _

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for the comments/kudos!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Maybe](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26042290) by [avatays](https://archiveofourown.org/users/avatays/pseuds/avatays)
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